Barack Obama at the White House Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
It's hardly news that the Obama administration is intensely and, in
many respects, unprecedentedly hostile toward the news-gathering
process. Even the most Obama-friendly journals
have warned of what they call
"Obama's war on whistleblowers". James Goodale, the former general
counsel of the New York Times during its epic fights with the Nixon
administration,
recently observed
that "President Obama wants to criminalize the reporting of national
security information" and added: "President Obama will surely pass
President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of
national security and
press freedom."
Still,
a new report released today by the highly respected Committee to Protect Journalists - its
first-ever on press freedoms
in the US - powerfully underscores just how extreme is the threat to
press freedom posed by this administration. Written by former Washington
Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr., the report offers a
comprehensive survey of the multiple ways that the Obama presidency has
ushered in a paralyzing climate of fear for journalists and sources
alike, one that severely threatens the news-gathering process.
The first sentence: "In the Obama administration's Washington,
government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press."
Among the most shameful aspects of the Obama record:
Six government employees, plus two contractors including Edward
Snowden, have been subjects of felony criminal prosecutions since 2009
under the 1917 Espionage Act, accused of leaking classified information
to the press—compared with a total of three such prosecutions in all
previous U.S. administrations. Still more criminal investigations into
leaks are under way. Reporters' phone logs and e-mails were secretly
subpoenaed and seized by the Justice Department in two of the
investigations, and a Fox News reporter was accused in an affidavit for
one of those subpoenas of being 'an aider, abettor and/or conspirator'
of an indicted leak defendant, exposing him to possible prosecution for
doing his job as a journalist. In another leak case, a New York Times
reporter has been ordered to testify against a defendant or go to jail."
It goes on to detail how NSA revelations have made journalists and
source petrified even to speak with one another for fear they are being
surveilled:
'I worry now about calling somebody because the contact can be found out
through a check of phone records or e-mails,' said veteran national
security journalist R. Jeffrey Smith of the Center for Public Integrity,
an influential nonprofit government accountability news organization in
Washington. 'It leaves a digital trail that makes it easier for the
government to monitor those contacts,' he said."
It quotes New York Times national security reporter Scott Shane as
saying that sources are "scared to death." It quotes New York Times
reporter David Sanger as saying that "this is the most closed, control
freak administration I've ever covered." And it notes that New York
Times public editor Margaret Sullivan previously wrote that "it's
turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and
unprecedented attacks on a free press."
Based on all this, Downie himself concludes:
The administration's war on leaks and other efforts to control
information are the most aggressive I've seen since the Nixon
administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington
Post's investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington
journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for
this report could not remember any precedent."
And this pernicious dynamic extends far beyond national security:
"Ellen Weiss, Washington bureau chief for E.W. Scripps newspapers and
stations, said 'the Obama administration is far worse than the Bush
administration' in trying to thwart accountability reporting about
government agencies." It identifies at least a dozen other long-time
journalists making similar observations.
The report ends by noting the glaring irony that Obama aggressively
campaigned on a pledge to usher in The Most Transparent Administration
Ever™. Instead, as the New Yorker's investigative reporter Jane Mayer
recently
said about the Obama administration's attacks:
"It's a huge impediment to reporting, and so chilling isn't quite
strong enough, it's more like freezing the whole process into a
standstill."
Back in 2006, back
when I was
writing frequently about
the Bush administration's attacks on press freedom,
the focus was on mere threats to take some of these actions, and that
caused severe anger from vocal progressives. Now, as this new report
documents, we have moved well beyond the realm of mere threats into
undeniable reality, and the silence is as deafening as the danger is
pronounced.
Related matter
Along with David Miranda, I testified yesterday before a Committee of
the Brazilian Senate investigating NSA spying, and beyond our
latest revelations about economic spying aimed at Brazil,
one of the issues discussed was the war on press freedoms being waged
by the US and UK governments to prevent reporting of these stories. The
Guardian, via Reuters,
has a two-minute video with an excerpt of my testimony on that issue.
UPDATE
Edward Snowden
was awarded this year's Sam Adams Whistleblower Award,
and several of his fellow heroic whistleblowers - including Thomas
Drake, Jesselyn Radack and Coleen Rowley - traveled to Moscow to present
it to him. An excellent photo of that event is
here.
© 2013 Guardian/UK
