Obama Continues Reign as Abusive Husband of American Media

At a conference on media
coverage of national security issues in New York, New York
Times reporter
James Risen called the Obama administration “the greatest enemy
of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a
generation.” He would certainly know. The Department of Justice is

trying to force him to reveal whether a former CIA official is
a source of classified information he used in a book. The CIA
agent, Jeffrey Sperling, is one of seven Americans the Obama
administration has charged under the Espionage Act of 1917.

The Nixonification of the administration on free press issues is

not exactly new news. As usual, I’m left wondering why
journalists are surprised that an administration that wants to
control so much of Americans’ lives with health care mandates and
an omnipresent framework of executive branch regulation also wants
to control them. Were they really, truly surprised that
they would be included among that which the Obama administration
seeks to manhandle into compliance? Risen added the media has been
“too timid” in responding. Maybe it’s because other media outlets
aren’t being affected? To put a cynical spin on it, the media has
largely been fine with the expansion of executive branch power
under Barack Obama except when it affects the media. While there’s
an increasing interest in media scrutiny of national security
issues, it’s still a small portion of what the media does. If many
media outlets’ concerns about executive power are based only on
self-interest, then those who aren’t involved in security reporting
might not care what happens to guys like Risen.

And then there’s also the “working the ref”
angle Reason’s Matt Welch
noted last year when looking at the media’s failure to
adequately critique the Affordable Care Act before the whole thing
went into effect and immediately crashed and burned. Our media is
often just as thin-skinned about criticism as our president is
rumored to be. And the surest way to put the media on the defensive
is to accuse it of unfairness and of being manipulated. Example:
Note how intelligence officials claim the media doesn’t truly
understand the information Edward Snowden is leaking and is
misreporting, even though the facts of the documents Snowden has
provided have not been disproven. But because of the pressure of
this response from the intel community, the media feels compelled
to pass along any claim that NSA metadata surveillance has helped
prevent terrorist attacks, despite the
lack of any evidence that the claim is at all true.

In other news about the relationship between government and
media, obviously whenever a government official claims they will
put policies or laws into place that preserve media freedom, it
should immediately be treated as likely nonsense. After the
Department of Justice revealed it had gotten secret subpoenas to
gather the phone records of several Associated Press reporters to
try to find a leak, the agency detailed new guidelines for
behavior. The stated intent was to clarify and reduce situations
where officials can demand records from journalists. Unfortunately,
the
policy gives the Department of Justice clearance to make
decisions based on what it classifies as “ordinary newsgathering,”
which is not a distinction the government should be allowed to
make. The DOJ also needs to believe that there are “reasonable
grounds” that a crime has occurred, which is almost no protection
at all from a government that is using an espionage law to try to
convict leakers. When a government operates in an environment where
it believes a crisis is an opportunity to expand its reach, there’s
a corollary: Treat every problem like a crisis. No doubt the DOJ
will be able to manufacture “reasonable grounds” whenever it feels
it needs to.

And that leads to the proposed federal
shield law, which would help protect journalists from having to
reveal sources to the federal government, mimicking the new DOJ
policy. Except, again, it’s full of all sorts of exceptions. All
the feds have to do is convince a judge that the information is
national security issue and the protection for journalists
collapses. It also allows the feds to keep the delay in notifying
media outlets that their records were taken if they believe
notification would impair their investigations, which it almost
always certainly would, so what happened to the Associated Press
will likely happen again. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he
thinks he has the votes
to get the shield law through the Senate, but there’s little
reason to trust that adding one more judge to the mix will provide
any better oversight.