By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, May 26 -- So one of the columnists Reuters collects like pets, Jack Shafer, thinks that secret subpoenas to look at journalists e-mails are not a problem.
Maybe Shafer's piece is just to be contrarian, to put an intellectual gloss on a company, Thomson Reuters, which is mostly about servicing high frequency stock traders.
But contempt for independent free press can be found in "news" parts of Reuters more faceless than Shafer. In 2012, Reuters UN bureau chief Louis Charbonneau repeatedly tried to get the UN to throw out Inner City Press, after a controversy about the uncredited use of stories first reported by Inner City Press.
(Charbonneau at an on the record meeting was asked to explain, but refused to, audio here.)
Turns out Reuters ties compensation to a reporter's number of labeled exclusives, even if the label is inaccurate.
Inner City Press wrote to Reuters' editor Stephen Adler and showed that the proceeding Reuters' Charbonneau hadstarted was leading to death threats from extremist supporters of Sri Lanka's government.
Adler and three other top executives did nothing; Charbonneau ramped up his campaign, including telling the UN he might leave if they didn't throw Inner City Press out, a real threat given the "service" Reuters' Charbonneau provides to the UN and certain Western missions.
In 2013, Inner City Press showed Adler that Charbonneau's subordinate Michelle Nichols, perhaps on his behalf, was linked to an anonymous social media account which among other things continued the false accusation of funding by the defunct Tamil Tigers.
Adler did nothing; nor did other Reuters officials made aware of it, including but not limited to Greg McCune, Paul Ingrassia and Walden Siew.
This social media trolling has continued, including this Memorial Day weekend.
Meanwhile the UN Correspondents Association's Executive Committee, on which Charbonneau is First Vice President, not only has done nothing about anti-press moves in UN, from the proposed elimination of media workspace in front of the Security Council to the installing of a UN surveillance camera over the entrance to the office of the Press and the new Free UN Coalition for Access. And now this.
In fact, the trolling social media accounts now claim that the lack of fight back to the elimination of media workspace is tied to the Reuters promoted fantasy of funding by a defunct terrorist group. This is Reuters. Watch this site.
