Views from Korea:
Adams, Jefferson and Early American
Press
By Yang Sung-chul, Republic of Korea
In Korea today, the proper relationship
between the government and the press and the role of the press are being debated. More
than two hundred years earlier, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson wrestled with the same
problem. David McCullough relates in his biography of John Adams, a story of James
Callender’s relationship with Adams and Jefferson. America’s second president
Adams, a Federalist, and Thomas Jefferson, a Republican who was the third president and
vice-president under Adams, were the two towering fathers of American Independence, but
political archrivals. Adams enacted the Sedition Act of 1789, which made any "False,
scandalous, and malicious" writing against the government, Congress or the President,
or any attempt "to excite against them the hatred of the good people of the United
States or to stir up sedition," crimes punishable by fine and imprisonment.
Soon after the Sedition Act came into effect,
Callander, a hack, was put in jail for violating this law. He became vengeful and was
determined to defeat "the wretch Adams", elect his patron Jefferson, and make
himself a martyr. He quit his hob in Philadelphia and started working as a Republican
propagandist in Richmond, Virginia. In the Richmond Examiner he praised Jefferson as
"an ornament to human nature" and maligned Adams as a "gross
hypocrite" and "in his private life one of the most egregious fools upon the
continent." He charged that Adams’s sole objective was to make war on France and
painted Adams as a man of war and Jefferson a man of peace.
In his four years as vice president,
Jefferson had so effectively separated himself from Adams and the administration that he
could be held accountable for anything. McCullough further contrasted these two founding
father’s striking ironies:
Jefferson, the Virginia aristocrat and slave
master who lived in a style fir for a prince, removed from his fellow citizens and their
lives, was hailed as the apostle of liberty, the man "Man of the People." Adams,
the farmer’s son who despised and practiced plain living, commonly upheld as the
American way, was scorned as an aristocrat.
Callender was out of Jail by the time
Jefferson took the presidency. Feeling that Jefferson owed him a great deal, he appealed
to Jefferson for money and a job through Madison, then Secretary of State. Madison altered
Jefferson to the situation and Jefferson instructed this personal secretary to give
Callender $50 on May 28, 1801. Furious at Jefferson’s stinginess, Callender switched
political sides to become the editor of a new Federalist paper, The Recorder, in Richmond.
And he started attacking Jefferson, including his affair with a slave named Sally Hemings,
claiming that Sally had five children by Jefferson. Anti-Jefferson Federalist papers had a
field day and a cartoon published in Newburyport, titled "A Philosophic Cock,"
showed Jefferson as a rooster with his dark hen Sally.
Historians, biographers and political
analysts never cease to enlighten us about Adams and Jefferson. McCullough’s best
seller, for example, rekindled public interest in John and Abigail Adams and provided new
momentum to reassessing their lives in a more objective light. By contrast,
Jefferson’s Sally Hemings affair still haunts him. The descendents of Hemings claim
their rightful place in the Jefferson family pedigree and their disputes continue.
Jefferson is often considered the champion of
free press. His famous motto is found in his letter to Colonel Edward Carrington on
January 16, 1787, which he wrote from Paris. "The basis of our governments being the
opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it
left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers
without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the later."
On June 11, 1807, about half a year before
the end of his second-term as president and 20 years after the aforesaid motto, Jefferson
wrote a letter to John Norvell, a resident of Danville, Virginia, who sought advice from
Jefferson on starting a newspaper. Deeply hurt and hounded by the press, Jefferson lashed
out that "the man who never looks into a newspaper is better formed than he who reads
them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth that he whose mind is filled
with falsehoods and errors:"
Then he gave the following advice tot he
aspiring editor: "Divide the paper into four chapters: heading the 1st, Truths, 2nd,
Probabilities, 3rd, Possibilities and 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short, as
it would contain little more than authentic papers and information from such sources as
the editor would contain what, from a mature consideration of all circumstances, his
judgement should conclude to be probably true. This, however, should be professedly for
those readers who would rather have lies for their money than the blank paper they would
occupy."
Le me end with a few admonitions from the
autobiography of the perennial UPI White House correspondent, Helen Thomas: "silence
is better than deliberate lies; reporters have unending mission to seek truth and find it
and report it; objectivity, the keystone of our profession; accuracy, thoroughness and
speed, too many (American) administrations have come into power over the last few decades
thinking of the press as an irritant at best, an enemy at worst, and not as
representatives who ask the questions on the minds of most Americans."
(The Writer is a former Korean ambassador
to the United States.) Courtesy: Korea Now Magazine, October 4, 2003, Embassy of South
Korea, Kathmandu.
Prostitution, a male-female
relationship like any other?
Complaisance of some,
indifference of others, widespread silence and ignorance about what may be one of the
greatest existing taboos: prostitution. In France, the silence is beginning to be broken.
A new momentum in ideas and action has appeared in recent years, with initiatives by
Parliament, government and voluntary organizations, relayed to public opinion by the
proliferation of reports on the subject in the media. A new awareness fitting the
infringement of basic human rights that prostitution, now a transnational phenomenon,
represents.
By Anne Rapin
"A magnifying mirror of social
relationships between the sexes1", keystone of male domination, prostitution is just
one of the acts of violence to which women are subjected by men in all societies and of
the recognized prerogatives of the male sex. Not a continent escapes it, but not all
confront it in the same way.
Since the mid 1990s, prostitution has seen a
resurgence at the international level. With the advance of globalization and the power of
the market, the collapse of superpowers and the opening of frontiers, we are witnessing
the expansion and refinement of slave trade networks, the growth of the sex industry and
sexual tourism and prostitution occurring on a massive scale. More than ever this problem
is taking on a transnational dimension. The traffic and trade in bodies very often depend
on the same networks as drugs, arms or money-laundering.
In 2002, it was estimated that more than 5
million people are being prostituted worldwide, mainly women and children. The clients,
however, are usually men. The annual turnover from prostitution is said to be 60 billion
euros worldwide and 10 billion in Europe. In France, 70% of the profits go to the pimps.
All of which explains the resistance
encountered by attempts to tackle prostitution, despite the gravity of the attack on basic
human rights that it represents. Kidnappings, confiscations of papers, pressure on
families, blackmail, training camps – where women are frequently submitted to rape
and torture – and murder pure and simple in some cases, the Mouvement du Nid2 reminds
us that the world of prostitution uses "methods which have always been used by those
involved in the slave trade". As in slavery, this French organization observes that
the person prostituted is depersonalized (treated like a consumer good), dependent on a
master, for the financial profit of others within a structured system. In France, 95% of
the 12,000 to 15,000 prostitutes are in the hands of some 10,000 pimps.
For some fifteen years, with the support of a
number of States, politicians and jurists, lobby groups have been actively campaigning,
especially at the European Union level, to steer legislation in favour of the regulation,
or even the legalisation, of prostitution, on the pretext of improving the working
conditions of sex workers and protecting them. This campaign, which aims to get
prostitution regarded as a business like any other, has relaunched the abolitionist
struggle supported in particular by France.
Refusing to punish prostitutes, considered to
be victims of systematic exploitation, the abolitionist system runs aid and social
rehabilitation schemes and campaigns against living off immoral earnings, punishable, in
France, by some of the harshest prison sentences and fines in the world. This setup is
completed by the French Central Office for the punishing of the trade in people (OCRTEH),
created in 1958, which reports to the French Ministry of the Interior. This body, the only
one of its kind in the world, has a number of functions: to centralize information on
prostitution and pimping at the national level, to co-ordinate investigations aimed at
dismantling the networks and arresting the pimps and to conduct investigations on the
ground, all in collaboration with the police and gendarmerie forces concerned.
"The human being is not a
merchandise"
In June 2000, before the United Nations
General Assembly in New York, asked to report on the situation five years after the
Beijing conference on women’s rights, France restated, through its spokesperson,
Secretary of State for Women’s Rights, Nicole Péry, that "The human being is
not a merchandise and therefore cannot be traded or sold" in line with the Convention
of December 2nd, 1949 on the "punishing of the crime of trading in people and the
exploitation of others by prostitution", signed and ratified by France in 1960 –
a solemn French declaration which has been hailed by a great many of the world’s
women’s organizations.
A conference in May 2000, organized by the
Scelles Foundation, with the aid of ten French organizations, at Unesco in Paris, with the
title "People of the abyss, prostitution today" rekindled the interest of the
authorities in the subject. In February 2001 a first activity report on "public
policy and prostitution" was presented by Dinah Derycke, president of the French
Senate delegation on women’s rights. In January 2002, a draft law was adopted, at the
first reading, by the Assemblée Nationale in the context of a parliamentary
fact-gathering mission on modern slavery. It provides renewable temporary residence and
work permits for people leaving Mafia networks, with secure accommodation for three
months.
Lastly, in March 2002, the sub-committee on
prostitution and the trade in people for sexual purposes, set up as part of the work of
the French national Commission against violence to women, made public the report and
recommendations of Malka Marcovitch, president of the Movement for the Abolition of
Prostitution, Pornography and all forms of sexual violence and sex discrimination (MAPP).
All of which are initiatives that testify to the global approach to the problem being
taken by France.
Text courtesy: Embassy of France,
Kathmandu, Nepal |
