Biden not keeping his word on press freedom
He’s vowed changes, but so far, as with Trump and Obama, his DOJ has targeted reporters.
A month before Donald Trump became president, former New York Times reporter James Risen penned a provocative observation: If Trump wanted to crack down on journalists and their whistleblower sources, he need only to consult the road map of his predecessor: President Barack Obama.
Risen spoke from experience as a journalist whose testimony the Obama administration tried for years to compel in a criminal leak investigation.
Despite Obama’s promises on the campaign trail of running the most transparent administration in history, his office was notorious for slow-walking open records requests.
Risen and journalism groups often decried that Obama used the Espionage Act to prosecute more government sources for leaking information to journalists — eight — than all previous presidents combined and that his Justice Department and FBI spied on reporters and editors, secretly obtaining records for their home phones and mobile numbers.
Trump didn’t just follow Obama down that road, he scorched the earth and burned the bridges, taking his war against the American press to levels not seen since Richard Nixon began adding reporters’ names to his enemies list.
Trump, as Fox News anchor Chris Wallace observed in a 2019 speech, “is engaged in the most direct sustained assault on freedom of the press in our history.”
That’s why journalists — and many Americans who value the fourth estate’s role in preserving our democracy — listened with hope and skepticism when candidate Joe Biden defended journalists against Trump’s “enemy of the people” villainization, and spoke against Trump’s call for more restrictive libel laws and demands to prosecute reporters who criticized him.
The skepticism turned out to be justified and the hope is fading as we observe yet another president whose words on press freedom do not jibe with his actions.
In March, the Biden administration told executives at the New York Times that Trump officials had spent months seeking email records of four of its reporters, then the Biden DOJ secured a gag order preventing those same executives from sharing that information with newsroom leaders.
On Friday, when the Times published an account of those conversations, a federal judge lifted the gag order — and the next day, the White House said it hadn’t even known about it until the night before.
Biden’s DOJ has sought subpoenas against USA Today, and continued other heavy-handed approaches begun under the Trump administration. Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan wrote an op-ed in his newspaper on Sunday condemning those “extraordinary measures” to secretly obtain journalists’ records, which despite Biden’s insistence in May that such efforts “are simply wrong,” have continued under his administration.
“New revelations suggest that the Biden Justice Department not only allowed these disturbing intrusions to continue — it intensified the government‘s attack on First Amendment rights before finally backing down in the face of reporting about its conduct,” Ryan wrote.
And finally, the DOJ announced this week that it would adopt the legal stance taken by the Trump administration — and roundly ridiculed by Biden as a candidate — that courts should dismiss author E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against Trump because the harsh and crude comments Trump made in denying her rape allegations against him were made while Trump was president.
In the past week, Biden and his Justice Department have taken steps to change course, and that’s deeply welcome.
Last week, it lifted the subpoena seeking records from USA Today and announced on Saturday that it will from now on avoid seeking records from journalists as evidence in leak prosecutions.
Biden could show his sincerity by insisting that the DOJ policy change be codified into firm department rules and lend his support to legislation that could bake them into law.
But alarmed journalists and the millions of Americans who depend on their news-gathering should remain vigilant and hold the president to his word. As the Columbia Journalism Review noted Monday, “the administration’s full-fledged commitment to government transparency is far from certain.”
Biden needs to make clear he doesn’t intend to repeat the stonewalling and spying he must have been aware of during this eight years in the Obama administration, when journalists found themselves surveilled and threatened with prosecution.
“In the Obama administration’s Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press,” said a damning report co-authored by Leonard Downey, the former executive editor of the Washington Post for the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Those suspected of discussing with reporters anything that the government has classified as secret are subject to investigation, including lie-detector tests and scrutiny of their telephone and e-mail records.”
In Obama’s second term, Attorney General Eric Holder announced new restrictions on seeking subpoenas against journalists and leak prosecutions became less frequent, but the chilling effect was already felt.
When Trump renewed and then ratcheted up the war on the press, it caused damage on a whole new level. Not only were whistleblowers put back on notice, Trump’s endless vilification of the media sought to weaken the legitimacy of a free press everywhere. A rising tide of modern authoritarians around the world took notice.
Press freedoms, like democracy itself, are under attack globally, and if Biden hopes to push against that current, he’ll need to do a better job at home in setting an example he can point to with pride.