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Free Press Essential to Every Democracy, Powell Says
Describes frustrations, impact of media with college editors The press has many obligations to criticize authority and present the
grievances of its readers, but its "transcendent value" is to keep
the people of a democracy informed, Secretary of State Colin Powell said
November 12 in remarks to a group of college newspaper editors. Powell acknowledged that he personally often finds himself frustrated or
angry with what is written or said by the news media, but he recognizes that
a free press "is an essential element of our democratic system, and I
would submit the democratic system of any nation that calls itself a
democracy." Satellite television has fundamentally changed the media environment in
which public figures like himself operate, according to Powell. "I have
to worry about television every minute of the day," he said. In response to a question about anti-Americanism, Powell said that it is
driven principally by two issues: war in " Powell said that when he spoke to young people around the world, he found
that after they unburdened themselves about foreign policy issues, they
expressed interest and affection for the "We're powerful," Powell observed. "And when you're
powerful, you're respected, and you're also resented. And I'm confident that
if we can get traction on both Powell said that the administration continues to seek the right balance
between homeland security and keeping the Following is the transcript of Secretary Powell's remarks to college
newspaper editors on November 12: (begin transcript)
Briefing We believe strongly in the free press. Now that's what you hear
everywhere. But I, for one, really do believe in it. As Secretary of State, I
have the opportunity to travel around the world to many places and to observe
many political systems and I have been to countries which are ruled by
tyrants, and I have been in countries which are the most active democracies
you have ever seen. And from years of experience in many different capacities, National
Security Advisor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or now, Secretary of
State, or just as a citizen traveling around, I come away, once again, with a
clear understanding of how a democracy has to function. Whatever the nature
of its political system, whether it's a democracy such as ours, with a
legislative branch, a Executive Branch and a Supreme Court that watches both
of them and interprets the Constitution, and the only one who can interpret the
Constitution, and our system is so strong that the American people understand
and the Executive and Legislative branches understand that they must never
challenge the Supreme Court when the Supreme Court says something. When we had the great civil rights movements of the '60s, the Supreme
Court said a high school in But the one thing that seems to be absolutely necessary for a real
democratic system to work is the Fourth Estate, as they call it. Executive, Legislative,
Court and the Fourth Estate. And the Fourth Estate really isn't identified
particularly in the Constitution except in the First Amendment: speech or the
right of the people to peacefully assemble will not abridged, will not be
restricted in any way. People are supposed to be able to come out and shout
and scream at their government. Hopefully, they won't do it too often and
hopefully they won't do it to me too often, but they do. And it's sometimes
quite annoying. It sometimes makes my life miserable. Very often, it's
dead-on and then I'm embarrassed. Very often, it's totally wrong and then I'm
just mad. But the best thing about being mad is you get over it and you get
mad and you read a paper and you throw it across the room, you get your remote,
you start clicking for some -- you know, get me Judge Judy. I don't want to
watch this any more, you know. (Laughter.) I've had enough of these guys. And so, you get annoyed. But I have been around a lot of years and I get
over my annoyance quickly because I understand that is the nature of our
system. You must have a free press that screams and hollers and makes your
life miserable. You all know the famous expression to -- you know, to take
care of the oppressed and to go after those who are afflicting the oppressed;
to comfort the afflicted and to go after those who are doing the affliction,
that's part of a free press. But there's another reason why I can also accept a very vigorous, open,
free press that sometimes gets it right, sometimes gets it wrong, and that is
I have another view of our democratic system, of democracies, in general, and
that is ultimately power and influence and judgment rests ultimately not in
the Executive Branch, not in the Legislative Branch, not even the Supreme
Court, and not in the press; it rests with the American people. And the American people are so much smarter than we think they are. And
we're here in Sometimes they get it wrong, we would argue, some would argue, but the
best thing about getting it wrong is you can do it again in two or three
years and get it right. And we have a habit of making our occasional
mistakes, and then four years later, what do we do, famous American
expression, "throw the rascals out," and you have a new election. And so it is a rather remarkable system, but it really is monitored and
taken care of by the American people and a free press, a free press
representing the American people. This also means that you are not all supposed to leave here with this
little sermon and go out and find something nasty to say about somebody or me
-- (laughter) -- because you are not just free to do whatever you darn well
please, as aspiring journalists or as editors of your college newspapers.
Your obligation is not just to get a story; your obligation is to the people
as well. I work for the American people. My oath is to the American people. I work
for the President, but ultimately, I work for the American people. You don't
take oath and you're not paid by any governmental institution, but you, too,
work for the American people. You have a role to play, and your principal
role, either as a college editor, or when you get out into the wonderful
world of big media -- not that your media is not big, I don't wish to be
talking down, it's big on your campuses. But you have an obligation to inform, to educate, to nudge, to present
grievances of your readers to authorities, but it all has to be ultimately
for the purpose of selling newspapers, yes, making a profit if you're in a
profit-making newspaper, after you graduate, of course, but it hast to have a
transcendent value and that transcendent value has to be to play your role in
our democratic system of keeping a public informed. Because if a public is
not informed, if the students who read your newspapers are not informed by
reading your newspapers so they can make informed choices, either during an
election or demonstration on campus, or what have you, or in the way they
think about things, if they have not been informed, then you haven't done
your job. Yes, you can have an edge -- and I have been exposed to that edge, not
only here but I think But I was a great reader of The Hilltop because I had responsibilities as
a member of the Board of Trustees of Howard University and I had to know what
was going on. So I'd get all of this stuff from the President of the
University, President Swygert, my good friend, and Pat Swygert would send me
all this stuff about what was going on on the campus. But what I also made sure that I got every single week, and would read
every single article and every single page, was The Hilltop because it gave
me greater insight as to what was going on on campus than anything I was
going to get from the Board Secretary or from the President. It gave me the
sense of touch and feeling of what the students felt and what we thought
about the students, what was really going on. It also kept me somewhat in
tune with 18, 19 and 20-year-olds. It gets harder as you approach your
seventies and even your children are in their forties. And so you play a very important role in your campuses, and I hope that
the experience you get on your campuses will hold you in good stead as you go
out into the world, and I don't know how many of you will enter journalism as
a profession, but it is a noble one, and it is an essential element of our
democratic system, and I would submit the democratic system of any nation
that calls itself a democracy. I have to deal with this a lot. I have to go to places like I must say, I sometimes envy their ability to lock up reporters who have
said untruths, but not really, because that's just part of our system. And no
matter what they say about you as a public official, the American people will
judge you either that way or in another way, and you trust their ultimate
judgment. So work hard with this, at least in college, chosen field of yours because
it truly is a noble undertaking. And I hope of those of you who are going
into the world of journalism, when you finish this, with your course of
instruction at your universities, you will have successful careers. Now, you are all in print media and print media I have found is changing
quite a bit in my 20-odd, 30 -- almost 30 years of experience at a fairly
senior level in Washington, because of the impact of the Internet and the
impact of television. Well, television has been around for a long time, but not
like it has been the last 10 or 12 years with an explosion of networks and
cable shows and all sorts of ways of presenting the news, presenting the news
as entertainment. The Jon Stewart -- how many watch Jon? Come on, admit it, I do, too.
(Laughter.) Yeah. Is it an entertainment show or is it half a news show? It's
becoming interesting to watch because it has a little take on the news, so
it's giving you some news, but in a humorous satirical way. And it's just an
indicator of what people are watching and how they're getting their news. And so, increasingly I find that the print media are playing catch-up with
the instantaneous cable information that is going out around the world, and I
find that in my work, I have to worry about television every minute of the
day. I only have to worry about what's going to be printed late on an evening
when they're getting ready to put the paper to bed for the next morning.
That's when Ambassador Boucher comes up and tells me about some horrible
thing that's going to be said about us tomorrow, or how some glowing -- he
never tells me about the glowing things; he just always calls me about the
horrible things. But I can wait till the end of the day to deal with that problem, or do it
at my pleasure. Not television. So there isn't a senior official in
government -- with perhaps the exception of the President, who has us to
worry about it for him -- who doesn't watch television almost constantly now.
We always have it on the background to see what's about to blow up in our face. A day like today, we watched the proceedings of the Arafat funeral, and
you know that Tony Blair's going to be here. And Prime Minister Blair's going
to be talking to the President about the And all of this is coming raw and straight into homes around the world.
And satellite dishes is a component of this television world in bringing
information and news and entertainment to places that never imagined it just
a few years ago. When I was a general about, oh, 12, 13 years ago, I would go to Turkey --
NATO ally, great friend of the United States, and Turkey had one television
channel -- they say 15 years ago -- one television channel, government-owned.
So the government told you what you needed to know, according to the
government, and that was it. And then something really interesting happened
in And now if you drive through News magazines, for those of you who will go there, they are only once a
week, but by the time they print, go to bed on a Saturday night, there isn't
anything that's happened that the whole world doesn't already know about. So
what are they news magazines of? So, increasingly, they have now taken an edge to their reporting because
they have to sell magazines on Monday morning and by Monday morning everybody
knows what happened Monday morning. They don't need even a newspaper to tell
them what happened then. And so the news magazines have changed and it
changes the whole mix around. So it's a fascinating world that you're entering, and I wish you all the
luck with it, and I wish that you have all success if this turns out to be your
chosen field, and I hope it is. We need the best and the brightest to go into
journalism in one form or another. Now, with that little sermonette, I will stop and see what questions might
be on your mind. Yes, sir. QUESTION: A lot of the information in our packet is about International
Education Week. My name is Chris. I'm from SECRETARY POWELL: Your ability to go abroad and study? QUESTION: Yeah. SECRETARY POWELL: No, I would have no reservation in recommending that any
of you take a fellowship to go to There is a higher degree of anti-Americanism in The part of this that you have to understand, though, is that it is
principally attitudes against Fine. I answered the questions. But then about 15 to 20 minutes in, they
got that out of their system, and then they started asking me about And you will discover that once you get over these topical problems that
are causing us such public relations difficulty, there's still a groundswell
of respect, affection, and some resentment for In fact, more and more Americans -- we had a great year last year of
passports issued, after the sort of drop-off after 9/11. More and more
Americans are now getting passports and traveling again. Let's see, the young -- who was the young lady a minute ago? You. No? QUESTION: Sure. (Laughter.) SECRETARY POWELL: Way to go. QUESTION: My name's Kelly Jasper, I'm from SECRETARY POWELL: Beg your pardon? QUESTION: Do you think you're going to stay in this appointment for a
while? I mean, how is your life going? (Laughter.) SECRETARY POWELL: You must be the Style section reporter. (Laughter.) QUESTION: No, I'm news, I just -- I have an interest. SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah. The President's still looking over the Cabinet,
and the Cabinet's looking over what the first four years were like. This is
not easy work. And so, we're all in conversations with the President, and he
will make known his decisions as we go through this process, and that's
really all I'm able to say about it. I know you wanted the scoop, but I can't
-- (laughter.) Yes. QUESTION: My name is Elizabeth Baza (ph) from SECRETARY POWELL: I've spoken there; I know it well. You were probably in
kindergarten at the time, but that's all right. (Laughter.) QUESTION: I probably was. SECRETARY POWELL: You didn't have to agree. (Laughter.) QUESTION: What are you views on future Homeland Security? What is the -- SECRETARY POWELL: We had a real problem after 9/11. Enormously traumatic
event in the life of the country to see the World Trade Center Towers fall
like that, and the building across the river, the Pentagon, you know, and the
plane in a field in Pennsylvania. And we knew there was terrorism out there
-- I mean, they tried to do the World Trade Center earlier -- and we've seen
our, you know, embassies shot up and blown up, but nothing like this that
traumatized the whole country, and the first statistics were, you know,
seven, eight thousand people dead. It turned out to be three thousand, but to
see these two buildings come down, and the American people said, what is this
all about? And as we looked at those who had committed the act, the acts, and we
looked at some of other policy, we realized that we were a wonderful country,
we were terribly open, but we weren't sure who was really coming into the
country, what they were doing once they got here, and is that the only reason
they came here, and when did they leave? When their, you know, after their
visas expire, do we have a way of knowing they've left? And then we also had the additional problem of somewhere in the
neighborhood of eight to ten million people in the country who are here
permanently and are aliens. They are undocumented, as we call them. They have
no legal basis to be here but we need them for our economy. I mean, we don't
know what we can do without these individuals who contribute so much to our
economy, end up paying Social Security taxes in many instances, and never get
anything out of the Social Security system, so they benefit our economy in a
number of ways. And we just had to do something about this, and so we cracked down, and we
cracked down on the issuance of visas, making it more -- a little more
difficult because you had to now give us other forms of identification and go
through a personal interview. And we started -- under the US-VISIT program,
give us fingerscans and photos. And we just started doing a better job of
integrating our databases so that we could check when we get a name of
somebody that we could bounce it against all the databases. Homeland Security is the one that does all of that, and so all of these
agencies, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Coast Guard, all
the agencies that are involved in commerce, bringing people and commerce into
our country, came into one department, the Department of Homeland Security.
We also passed the Patriot Act, which has been controversial, but we needed
new authorities in order to protect the country. After about two years, we were well on our way to putting this all
together, but we paid a price, and I started working with Secretary Ridge,
and we really started to press the President on this, that we've got to
secure our borders but we've got to keep our doors open. We can't shut
ourselves down. The easiest way to prevent anyone from ever getting in the
country again to do something like this is not letting anybody come into the
country, but we wouldn't be the same country. We want people to come. So we are now rebalancing this, so Homeland Security is working with the
State Department to make sure that we know who's coming into our country and
still make it easier to get here and encourage people to come. When we first
started doing the fingerscan, everybody was screaming, how dare you do this
to us? And the Europeans screamed the loudest. These are the same Europeans who
you have to have papers to go into a hotel and register, and you remember the
famous French expression, "Your papers, Monsieur, your papers,
please." We don't have any papers. And so people got all upset when we
suddenly started to ask for some accountability of people coming into the
country, and I think this will all work out. So Homeland Security is doing its job well, and I think people will see,
through our programs and our publications and our media outreach, that we
want to remain an open country, and there are still people lined up trying to
get visas at my consular offices to come here. They want to come here. Yes, sir. QUESTION: Kind of a follow-up to the previous question, as regards rebalancing.
Oh, by the way Jed Blue (ph), SECRETARY POWELL: George Mason? QUESTION: Yeah. We have a very large international student population, and
there has been a lot of effort, a lot of concern from them about the
increasing difficulty in getting student visas, and also due to increasing
restrictions on where and how they can work, increasing difficulty in paying
to live in SECRETARY POWELL: We've made a major effort on speeding up student visas,
and if you'll look at the data, the time it takes is going down. It usually
takes a year or so, though, for the reality of it going down to translate
into people telling you that it's going down when they get to your campuses.
And we're trying to, you know, work that off as fast as we can. It will never be as easy or as fast as it used to be. The other aspect to
that is if you say you're coming here for one purpose, then you can't transfer
that into another purpose. If you say, you know, the presumption in the
application for a visa is that you're coming here to stay, and you have to
prove to us that you are not coming here to stay and to get a job. You have
to prove to us that you're coming for the purpose of the visa, and if you
violate that purpose of the visa, then you've violated the visa and you have
a problem. And you can't just slide into the rest of our economy because you
came here to go to school. So that causes some concerns with young people who want to do something
other than which they've told us they're coming here for. It's not
unreasonable for us to say, now, wait a minute, you need to go home, get
another visa, and try again if that's what you're coming here for. That's
part of the whole tightening-up process. One of the problems we've been having is to convince students around the
world that we really do want them to come here. There's another aspect to
that that's affecting our numbers, and that is that a lot of other countries
are now going after those students who are having trouble coming here. So I
find they're going to universities in England, Australia, New Zealand because
they don't have to go through this. The other thing that really causes even more problems than that, and I
knew this, but I got it from a group of Muslim students that I had at an
Iftar dinner the other night, and I asked them, you've been here now in this
country on your programs, your exchange programs, for a number of weeks or
months. Has anyone been rude to you? Have you been insulted because you're a
different color or a different ethnicity or you dress differently? Has
anybody insulted you as you go around our neighborhoods, all here in this
area? And the answer from these nine students was no. There's been only one
insulting thing; that's the airport, coming to the airport. Secretary Ridge and I are working hard on this, to reduce the -- what's
often seen as profiling and heavy-handedness at our airports, and we've made
some changes recently that I think will improve this as well. Let someone in the back -- young man. QUESTION: Yeah, (inaudible), George Washington. SECRETARY POWELL: I'm a graduate of George Washington. QUESTION: I'm aware. (Laughter.) I want to ask you about -- staying on the
topic of the decline of international students studying in the U.S., people
in higher education have talked about the educational dangers of that. I was
wondering if you could discuss what diplomatic consequences there may be to
less international students studying here. SECRETARY POWELL: They're serious. They're very serious. We are seeing
numbers go up again, and we've started some new Fulbright programs, and what
I'm constrained on is the amount of money I have to put into these programs.
I'd like to double, triple, quadruple the amount of money I have for such
programs and I keep pleading with Congress to give me more. And in recent months, we have started to reach out to affinity groups,
like if there is a large Ukrainian-American club or association in one part
of the country, let's go to them, see if they want to partner with the State
Department and help us bring youngsters in under our program and they help us
pay the cost so they can do more sponsorship than they're doing now. So we're
trying to get leverage through affinity groups, as well as businesses, go to
a particular business and say you really want to be a part of this effort and
help us get more kids into the country. As I go around the world, you'd be astonished how many times I've gone to
a country and I start reading the bios of the leaders that I'm going to be
meeting, and so many of them were either Fulbright scholars or were here in
one of our international visitors programs, and it makes such a difference. The current President of the Republic of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, is
one of our international visitors program graduates, as is almost every
member of his cabinet. And so I go to Tbilisi and we sit across the table,
and they're all shouting, "I went to George Washington," "I
went to --" or "I was in --" and they came here and got their
education. But what I found is that it's not just the education they get here. It's
the experience they get here of living in our kind of a system. It doesn't
mean they're going to go back and be Jeffersonian democrats or design a
system just like us, but they leave here with far more than an education.
They leave here with, you know, some sense of values and how democracies can
be made to work. And so, we need to have more and more and more and more of
these kinds of programs, and put more and more people in them. I'm a great
supporter of this effort. Yes, dear. Howard, I've got to do Howard. MR. BOUCHER: It's going to have to be the last one. SECRETARY POWELL: She'd go back up there and talk about me and write an
editorial if I didn't do Howard. (Laughter.) QUESTION: Well, for this presidential election, the growing discontent
with the war on terrorism was one of the major issues. How has the State
Department tried to combat this discontentment and show Americans that the
war in Iraq was necessary? SECRETARY POWELL: The American people, I think, are supportive of the
global war on terror and I think the American people fully understand what we
did in Afghanistan and I think they're pretty pleased that they now see a
free election in Afghanistan about a month ago where all of these people who
were told not to vote by the terrorists, the al-Qaida and Taliban terrorists,
don't vote, we'll kill you, we'll blow up the polling places, we won't let
you have a democracy, we won't let you pick your own leaders, and
nevertheless millions of these people said we're coming anyway. And they
voted. The President likes to talk about the fact that the first vote cast was by
a 19-year-old woman who, you know, a few years earlier wouldn't have dreamed
of coming out of her house, much less going to a polling place. And I
remember watching pictures on CNN of a woman who still was traditionally
covered in a burka from head to toe with, you know, the mesh in front of her
face, but out from underneath the burka came her hand with her ballot. She
wanted to vote. And so we're very proud, I think, of that. Now, in Iraq it's a different issue. It was a controversial war. It has
turned into being a difficult insurgency. So the American people want to see
this one finished, but as you saw from the recent election, as you referred
to the campaign, the American people showed that they continue to support the
President in his prosecution of the global war on terror. I think attitudes here in the country, as well as around the world, as I
mentioned, will change as we show success in Iraq. If we can get the kind of
election in Iraq in January that we got in Afghanistan in October, then I
think people will see, a-ha, now the Iraqi people have their own leaders. And when people criticize the war and say that, you know, we're doing
terrible things, I've got to push back and say you ought to look at the
things that are being done by the terrorists. The people who are blowing up
bombs are blowing up the hopes and dreams of people to choose their own
leaders. The people who mutilate their fellow citizens, fellow Iraqi
citizens, want to go back to a time when Iraq was governed by a dictator and
tyranny was the rule of law. And even though it's very tough for us now, we're losing soldiers and the
Iraqis are losing soldiers, it's still the right thing to do to prosecute
this through to a conclusion so that the Iraqi people will be put on a democratic
foundation and the rule of law with free elections and a constitution and
become a place that is peaceful in the region, as opposed to being run by a
tyrant or us going back to the days of tyranny. I think we can make that case to the American people and I think the
recent election certainly indicated that. What have I got, Richard, time for one? I've got to go do Al Arabiya.
(Laughter.) I'd rather stay here. Okay, we'll take one more. I'm sorry. QUESTION: Ann Klasky (ph) from American University. Since President Bush's
reelection, there have been some reports of people intending to expatriate.
What do you think of this and what kind of consequences could it have if
people actually followed through? SECRETARY POWELL: Well, I haven't -- all of the celebrity figures that I
saw, and there weren't many, but I saw a couple of celebrity figures saying
if President Bush gets reelected they're leaving the country. But so far, I
don't have any increase in passport applications. (Laughter.) If they wish to
leave, it's a free choice that they can make, but I don't sense that any of
them have left, to the best of my knowledge. Do you know of any who have
left? QUESTION: I've just seen people intending to leave. I haven't seen any
reports of people that actually -- SECRETARY POWELL: It's quite a different thing to intend to walk away from
this country and actually do it. It happened during the Vietnam War. We had
people who left rather than serve and there are a few Americans in other
countries and Canada who -- because they don't wish to serve. But all of the
celebrities who are making those claims, to the best of my knowledge and
belief, they're all still working here. I think I'll stop right there. It's getting too tempting. (Laughter.)
Thank you all. Good luck. Bye-bye. (end transcript) (Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S.
Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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