Be angry, but not at reporters

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.

“Oh, man, we know what’s going on in North Korea,” Franklin assured his listeners on KOGO-AM (600). “We know Kim Jong Il is a madman who is starving his country to death.”

Yes, we know. But how do we know? Because independent sources -- particularly journalists like the Current TV duo and aid workers -- have been brave enough to risk their own safety to get the word out, knowing that their subject nation is perfectly willing to jail, torture and kill innocents to control the flow of information to the outside world.

Ling, a 32-year-old Northern California native, was following in the path blazed by her older sister, Lisa, the television correspondent who three years ago sneaked into the communist nation to make a documentary of her own. (In one chilling account from the resulting National Geographic documentary, patients knelt and wept in praise of their Dear Leader, rather than offer thanks to the visiting surgeons who had just restored their vision with cataract surgery.)

KOGO guest Barnhart tried to argue just the point -- that journalists helped provide the very sort of transparency Franklin and others say they want. But it’s not currently in vogue to admit that reporters do anything useful.

“I just think it was irresponsible and it’s put the United States and 300 million people in a very difficult position,” Franklin responded, going on to say journalists should proceed only when they won’t put their “nation and other people’s lives at risk.”

So when would it be entirely safe, without any possible pitfall, to report on a regime that’s spent decades repressing its own citizens and menacing the world community?

“You could say there is never a ‘good’ time to do this story,” said Bob Dietz, Asia project coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Isn’t one of the whole points of repression to cow outsiders from peering inside Kim Jong Il’s great black box? Our core values as a nation urge us to turn a deaf ear on such extortion.

Perhaps the crowd that would play by the dictator’s rules, and blame the journalists, is relatively small.

Most chat rooms brimmed Tuesday with messages of sympathy for the two women, who at last report were being held separately under house arrest.

Concern for their situation peaked not only because of accounts about bleak and dangerous conditions in North Korean prisons, but because of their personal circumstances. Ling suffers from a persistent ulcer and may need medical attention. Lee, on her first foreign trip as a journalist, left a 4-year-old daughter back in the United States.

A petition demanding their release had attracted 40,000 signatures by Tuesday afternoon. But a determined minority continued to wag a collective finger.

A person commenting on the Hollywood Gossip website said the two journalists “knew exactly what they were doing,” adding that “at least these girls got a trial of some sort.”

Yeah, that Socialist Constitution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea provides all sorts of wonderful protections.

The journalists’ capture has no doubt complicated our relationship with an already intractable opponent. A range of experts believes that North Korea will resist humanitarian pleas for an early release and try to bargain away the sanctions it should face for building a renegade nuclear arsenal.

President Obama’s task has become more complicated, but for good reason. The nation he’s duty-bound to protect is worth the fight, in no small measure, because it puts a special value in its truth tellers.

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On the Media also appears on Fridays on Page A2.

james.raine y@latimes.com