Jumpy, but for a reason

Immediately it got compared to abuses by authoritarians in Germany and the Soviet Union as well as to American McCarthyism and Nixon’s enemies list.

People are jumpy these days, understandably.

A reporter with Bloomberg.com scoured postings on fbo.gov — short for Fed-Biz-Opps, a General Services Administration site where government agencies announce contract opportunities—and found a notice from the Homeland Security Department titled “media monitoring services.”

The department was looking for firms willing and able to set up a password-required international database of journalists, including bloggers and even social media posters, and “media influencers,” along with possible additional information such as political affiliations or points of view.

The posting specified that more than 290,000 media sources encompassing more than 100 languages would be monitored.

A contributor to forbes.com soon reposted the news and said she was pulling the covers higher over her head owing to this new danger for the free press.

Journalists worldwide get killed or jailed these days for trying to report the news or for expressing views critical of a government. In the United States, we have a president who gets in front of right-wing crowds and points to the media platform to call its occupants the most dishonest people he’s ever seen.

Many in the media have reacted with alarm to this plain invitation by the U.S. government’s main domestic defense agency for someone to build for it a vast and revealing media-monitoring database.

The spokesman for Homeland Security said the database was standard practice and that anyone thinking otherwise was a tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorist.

I’m inclined to think the spokesman is right in the first part—that this is standard practice—but wrong in the last part—that anyone fearing otherwise is crazy.

Nixon’s enemies list was kept secretly, not advertised via a government job-seeking forum. It also was entirely domestic and clearly reflective of vengeful paranoia toward domestic political opponents.

Homeland Security’s openly advertised contract seems to be mostly about a possible scenario such as this one: A blogger or Facebook poster in, say, Turkey, writes something that alarms Homeland Security. The agency wants a private site where an employee can punch in a password and look up the blogger and see quickly what political association or history the poster might have and with whom he might have been talking and what his record of accuracy and insight might be.

Homeland Security already knows that columnist Paul Krugman doesn’t much like the current American government and talks to liberals and economists, mostly; or that Robert Costa of the Washington Post is a very good straight-news reporter who gets a lot of information from somebody in the White House, which is the kind of thing that has driven all modern presidents crazy; or that Katy Tur of NBC detests President Trump and talks mostly to other people who detest him, but hardly does so secretly, since she brings those people on her MSNBC show to interview them before the world.

American journalists tend to be their own walking database revelations. They live accountably, not secretly.

But … it is hardly irrational, but wise, for American journalists—indeed all Americans—to remain alert to this development and wary of anything suggesting that the federal government conceivably might be setting itself up to spy on its own people for partisan reasons.

One of the best things about the American media is that it finds items such as this one, and reports them, and thus alerts those who are properly wary.

One of the best things about America is that those kinds of things can be found.

One of the best things about American journalism is that it reaches beyond instinctive reactions to seek proper context.

I figure this will prove to be more an international media database than an infringement on the American First Amendment. Indeed, Susan Hennessey, a fellow in national security and governance studies at the liberal Brookings Institution, tweeted: “Appears to be a normal PR strategy, not the beginning of the end of the free press.”

Homeland Security’s job is, as the name suggests, to keep the country safe on its soil from terror emanating anywhere in the world. A key element of that is tracking media reports worldwide. It seems perfectly legitimate and logical for the agency to seek creation of database as a resource through which it might learn more about global incidents and global media reports.

But it would be nice if our Congress was responsibly objective enough to be trusted to keep a credible eye on this program.

Right now, the lack of a responsibly objective and credible Congress is a bigger problem than a publicly advertised media-monitoring contract.

Might it be that the Trump administration advertised this site to give what will be a sinister program a veneer of openness?

I am thankful that the Trump administration has given no signal of being that smart.