It seemed for a while this week that we might be having one of those 9/11 moments: the country bound together in sadness and resolve over the 12-year prison sentence meted out by North Korea to a pair of American journalists.
Press freedom organizations recoiled. Regular citizens gathered signatures. They demanded freedom for Laura Ling and Euna Lee, sentenced Monday to hard labor, nearly three months after they were arrested as they gathered information near the Chinese-Korean border.
But then a small but determined backlash took form, from a minority who say that reporters who go where they are not supposed to go get what they deserve. That's unsettling, but not surprising given a more insidious sentiment loose in the land: that journalists haven't earned and don't deserve any special privileges.
It's a populist nostrum that seeps into my e-mail basket and oozes from blogs and mainstream media websites with some regularity.
Readers unload some of their nastiest barbs when I write about reporters who dare to claim they should be able to withhold confidential sources from the government. High schoolers tell researchers they are disinterested or ambivalent about the 1st Amendment.
The case of Ling and Lee provides the most recent reminder that some people passionately defend our freedoms, except when it becomes clear they won't come free.
We know from long experience that gathering information in difficult terrain can get messy. But when it does, these back-benchers can't wait to jettison the ideals that set us apart in the first place.
San Diego radio host Chip Franklin had been chattering happily about TV shows Monday morning when a regular guest -- Aaron Barnhart, television critic for the Kansas City Star -- expressed his concern about the lengthy prison sentence for Ling and Lee.
"It's a bargaining chip, Aaron; they are not going to serve 12 years," asserted Franklin, a sometime stand-up comic. The host then demanded to know, "What the hell were they doing in North Korea?"
For starters, no one other than the North Koreans has asserted that the journalists were in that country, rather than just over the border in China. It seems fair to assume, based on Ling's track record, that she was hoping to produce some precious information about what life is like under a hideously repressive regime, specifically, on human trafficking in the border region.
