A thanks to Streep for defending a free press

Thank you, Meryl Streep.

I often have been annoyed by Hollywood stars who use award shows to make political statements, although I have made exceptions for those who support causes that I also happen to support. Call me human.

I would have been delighted by Streep’s pitch for press freedom and the Committee to Protect Journalists even if — full disclosure — I were not a member of its board.

Streep, who supported Democrat Hillary Clinton, received the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award during Sunday’s Golden Globes ceremony. In her acceptance speech, she criticized Donald Trump for mocking a New York Times reporter with a disability.

Trump, who has praised Streep’s talents as “excellent” in the past, lashed back with typical Trumpian excess. In three tweets the next morning, he called Streep — the winner of multiple Golden Globes, Academy Awards, Emmys and numerous other awards — “one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood” and a “Hillary flunky.”

Considering the source, Streep should consider all that a compliment.

But she also had a more serious message about the rise of intolerance as a campaign tool. “You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now,” she told the audience at the event, which is produced by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, repeating a joke told earlier by fellow actor Hugh Laurie. “Think about it, Hollywood, foreigners and the press.”

She then called on “the famously wellheeled Hollywood Foreign Press (Association) and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists because we are going to need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.”

As partisan as the Trump-Streep clash may sound, it is important to note that the Committee to Protect Journalists is nonpartisan in its advocacy for press freedom.

The organization protested the 2010 court order that exposed Fox News reporter James Rosen to possible prosecution as an alleged “aide, abettor and/or conspirator” of an indicted leak defendant. Rosen was simply doing his job as a journalist. Eric Holder, who was attorney general at the time, later called that order his biggest regret.

CPJ also protested the Obama administration’s order of New York Times reporter James Risen to testify against a defendant or go to jail. The administration eventually ended its pursuit of that case too.

In a tough 2013 CPJ report on President Barack Obama’s administration and the press, still posted on the CPJ.org website, Leonard Downie Jr. criticizes the Obama administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information as “the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration,” when he was one of the editors involved in the Washington Post’s Watergate investigation.

My point, as Risen pointed out in a recent New York Times op-ed, is that if Trump, as president, decides the FBI should spy on a reporter or throw a whistleblower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, “he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama.”

Obama himself has bristled at this notion. It was in response to pressure from both parties in Congress that the administration became so aggressive in its pursuit of leaks, Team Obama points out. As a result, the administration prosecuted nine cases involving whistleblowers and leakers, compared with only three in all previous administrations.

But if that much of an increase in prosecution comes from an administration that strongly defends press freedom, what can we expect from the administration of a man who herded reporters into pens in the back of rallies so he could more dramatically call the media “dishonest,” “disgusting,” “slime” and “scum”?