II. On Political Rights and Freedom
The presidential election, often symbolized as US democracy, infact is the game and competition for the rich people. Presidential candidates have to raise money far and wide for their expensive campaign cost and most of the donors are big companies and millionaires. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had raised as high as 113 million US dollars in their 2000 presidential campaign, a record in US history, and the fund raising is expected to reach 200 million US dollars for this year's re-election campaign (see Britain's Independent newspaper on Jan.20, 2004).
Statistical figures from the Center for Responsive Politics showed that Lockheed Martin Corp., the country's biggest arms dealer, has been the biggest political donor. The company had donated 10.6 billion US dollars for political campaigns in the United States from 1999 to 2000 and has been the main donor to the Committee on Armed Services of the House of Representatives as well as one of the top ten donors to the Committee on Appropriations of the House.
The so-called "freedom of press" in the United States has also been brought under intensive criticism. According to an investigative report of the Sonoma State University in the United States, freedom of press, speech and expression of opinion in the United States is amid a crisis. An increasing number of US media organizations are getting involved in false reporting or cheating scandals. On June 5, 2003, two chief editors of the New York Times resigned after their role in a plagiarism scandal was exposed. John Barrie, head of Plagiarism.org in Oakland, California, claimed that "every newspaper in this country is not doing due diligence" and "everybody's got this problem".
Meanwhile, the US government has exercised an extremely tight control over news media, which went to the extreme during the 2003U.S.-led war against Iraq. During the war, the US government had tried every means to prevent the press from getting timely and true information and had wielded its hegemony to override the journalistic principle of "faithful and unbiased reporting". PeterArnett, a veteran reporter with the US National Broadcasting Company (NBC), was fired simply because he voiced some of his personal views on the Iraq war. News coverage by international media in Iraq also often fell prey to US restrictions and crackdown. Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has accused US troops in Iraq of frequent "obstruction of journalists trying to do their jobs in Iraq" and described the number of attacks on press freedom there as "alarming" (see Reuters story onOct. 20, 2003).
In January 2004, the U.S.-installed Iraqi Interim Governing Council issued an order to ban the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera TV station from covering any activity of the Council's members between January 28 and February 27. A book named "Black List", co-written by 15 American reporters, has warned that America's press freedom is facing danger. In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, Kristina Borjesson, one of the book's authorsand a former reporter with the CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) and CNN (Cable News Network), said that US authorities had controlled all information to be spread by the media while journalists had degenerated into the government's stenographers (see French newspaper Le Figaro on May 8, 2003).
The U.S. has also time and again launched attacks on news media organizations and journalists in Iraq. In one of such attacks on April 8, 2003, the US troops bombed the Baghdad branch of an Arab TV station and killed one cameraman on the spot.