By Stephanie Vosk

Northeastern University hosted a panel discussion titled “Freedom of Information” Thursday afternoon in Snell Library that explored the role of journalists during wartime and the reliability of the current media coverage in Iraq. The three panelists spoke about America’s loss of inherent freedoms since September 11.

Boston Globe media critic Mark Jurkowitz, Northeastern journalism professor Nicholas Daniloff and director of the Cambridge Public Library Susan Flannery each gave their views on censorship and media coverage in the country.

“[September 11] was a long time ago,” Jurkowitz said. “We are in a completely different war now and frankly, under completely different circumstances.”

Jurkowitz went on to say that just as the approval ratings of the Bush administration are nowhere near what they were after the terrorist attacks, Americans have again become skeptical of reporters.

“In normal times, when we’re actually doing our jobs, we get horrible ratings,” Jurkowitz said of American journalists. After September 11, however, as Jurkowitz touches on in the Journalism Ethics and Issues class he teaches at NU, “the public actually started liking journalists again.”

He feels, however, that the war in Iraq may change that. He explained his belief that American news channels are not covering the war in Iraq objectively, but are only presenting an American point of view.

“Television news is not a pristine product. You don’t read ‘we’ and ‘us’ in the Boston Globe or The New York Times or any other newspaper in America,” he said. “I’m not sure that is what anchors should be saying.”

He also gave his opinion on the actual coverage by journalists embedded with troops in Iraq.

“We are getting the kind of up close and somewhat personal looks of some aspects of war we haven’t seen since Vietnam,” he said.

He said, however, that these reports also tend to be somewhat biased.

“You’re on a military adventure,” he said of the reporters. “[The soldiers] are the guys with the guns while you’ve got your notebook out.”

Jurkowitz said that some reporters may tend to produce “cheerleading” reports based on their admiration for the men who protect their lives.

Daniloff, whose years working in Russia and the former Soviet Union give him an insight into what it is like to report from a foreign country, discussed the censorship situation in America and how it is nowhere near as strict as that of the former Soviet Union.

“In situations of war, there is a desire to restrict all sorts of information. I suspect what we’ll hear today is reasonably depressing news,” Daniloff said.

Daniloff went on to talk about his nine years working in Russia, a country in which censorship was “well established.”

He stood in front of the crowd gathered in Snell Library for the panel discussion and held up a “secret Soviet book” that listed everything that was not to be covered in the open press. The book forbade the press to disclose the exact location of airports, facts about crashes and instances in the air and facts or estimates of overall harvests and government purchases.

In regards to the rule that all articles were to be shown to a government censor for prior review in the Soviet Union, Daniloff admitted, “We’re not there yet.”

He spoke of his own punishment when he was arrested by the KGB, the secret Russian police, as an alleged spy and was held captive for two weeks.

He said that in the United States, journalists are merely shunned for publishing articles the government does not like.

“I doubt that hooliganism is going to be a method that the administration is going to use, but that would be a telltale sign if they did,” he said.

Unlike Daniloff, Flannery believes that censorship is becoming a problem in the United States.

Flannery spoke about the newly instated Patriot Act, which allows the FBI to access previously undisclosed library and bookstore circulation records. Under the act, agents only need to claim that the records may be part of an ongoing investigation in order to access them.

While most libraries have software that automatically deletes records after material is returned, “If they say they want all the information on a specific person, I would then have to start recording information in the future,” she said.

The Patriot Act violates the librarian code of ethics to protect its users’ privacy.

“[The act] is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us,” Flannery said. “When you use a bookstore, pay cash.”