Editor's note: This story has been revised from the print version to include information regarding the prosecution of Julian Assange.
In November 2015, a few months after declaring his candidacy for President, Trump mocked a reporter with a disability during a South Carolina rally. Over the next year, the Trump campaign excluded critical media from rallies. He pledged to make it easier to sue for defamation. He threatened Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly after she aired a segment about a Daily Beast report that he had raped his former wife Ivana.
“I almost unleashed my beautiful Twitter account on you, and I still may,” Kelly quoted Trump saying in her book, Settle for More. Then he followed through on the threat, tweeting about her sixty-four times during the Republican primary. Kelly reported receiving rape and death threats. During her family vacation in Disney World, she hired a personal security guard.
Trump, a creature of the media he so often maligns, constitutes a unique threat to press freedom in the United States. No previous President has matched him in terms of the sheer quantity of vitriol he spews toward the Fourth Estate. But even as the President has consolidated the worst impulses of government secrecy post-9/11, the main threat to reporters is not one of censorship or imprisonment. It is an attack on the norms that form the fundamental basis of a free press.
At the Committee to Protect Journalists, the global press freedom nonprofit where I work, we have often seen political leaders around the world use their platforms to threaten or harass the media. We’ve seen hostile rhetoric morph into censorship and repression in Ecuador, Turkey, and the Philippines. And now we are seeing heightened threats to journalists in the United States.
Over the past eight years, the Committee to Protect Journalists has ramped up efforts to document U.S. press freedom abuses, and launched a new North America program. We have our work cut out.
According to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, Trump has bashed the media on Twitter more than 1,450 times since he declared his campaign for President. Since assuming office, the quantity of tweets against the media has declined somewhat, but only because he is tweeting slightly less: They now constitute a greater percentage of his Twitter presence.
Despite Trump’s hostile actions toward the media, there are ample signs of press resilience.
In office, Trump has allegedly discussed jailing reporters with his FBI director, revoked CNN journalist Jim Acosta’s press credentials after he asked aggressive questions, and repeatedly called the press the “enemy of the people.”
Moreover, Trump may have used the regulatory powers of the government to retaliate against media companies. His Department of Justice opposed the merger of Time Warner and AT&T—possibly, as some reporting suggests, because of his animus toward CNN, owned by Time Warner. When Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered in Turkey by the government of Saudi Arabia, Trump helped cover for the Saudi crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, who experts believed ordered the execution.
Yet despite Trump’s hostile actions toward the media, there are ample signs of press resilience:
- THERE HAS BEEN NO MASS CHILLING EFFECT ON REPORTING.
The Trump Administration seems, if anything, to have galvanized aggressive accountability journalism. Journalists have fact-checked more than 10,000 falsehoods from the President, investigated claims of sexual harassment by him, and unearthed years of his questionable tax schemes. They are not pulling their punches.
- NO JOURNALISTS HAVE BEEN SENTENCED TO JAIL IN THE UNITED STATES FOR THEIR WORK.
While dozens of journalists have been arrested in the course of their work and jailed overnight and one journalist was subsequently placed in immigration detention, none have received jail or prison sentences. Nor have journalists been imprisoned for refusing to give up their sources, although some sources have been punished. Under George W. Bush, New York Times journalist Judith Miller spent eighty-five days in jail for refusing to reveal a source.
- THE LEGAL PRECEDENT FOR PRESS FREEDOM REMAINS SOLID, ALTHOUGH THE RECENT INDICTMENT OF JULIAN ASSANGE COULD PUT IT IN JEOPARDY.
While there is some debate over how it is being applied, the Trump Administration has kept in place Obama-era guidelines that make it harder to subpoena reporters. And the press still enjoys protections that make it hard to block the publication of state secrets, win a libel case if you are a public figure, and prosecute reporters for publishing protected information. The greatest legal test will come if Assange is extradited to the United States and convicted under the Espionage Act. The indictment criminalizes soliciting and publishing classified information, activities that are at the heart of national security journalism. While some lawyers are optimistic that First Amendment arguments will prevail if the case reaches U.S. courts, the indictment itself hangs as a threat to reporters.
The message to dictators has been clear: Press freedom is not an international priority for the United States under Donald Trump.
As the Committee to Protect Journalists’ North America program coordinator, I also cover Mexico. There, the federal government has deployed sophisticated spyware against critical journalists; reporters are routinely murdered in retaliation for their reporting; and government officials leverage massive advertising contracts with the media to obtain softer coverage. My colleagues work with journalists in Turkey, where at least sixty-eight journalists are in prison for their work, and China, where mass surveillance and censorship are common. In many countries, journalists are labeled terrorists and imprisoned.
But in the United States, strong institutions have protected the media’s rights, in part because of past legal battles. The fight in 1971 over the publication of a history of the Pentagon Papers, and the government’s equally ill-fated effort to suppress publication of an article by The Progressive in 1979, established the media’s broad right to publish information that might otherwise be protected from disclosure.
While journalists can still be subpoenaed in court to testify about their sources, federal subpoenas are relatively rare. Trump’s threat to open up libel laws was empty: Not only are there no federal libel laws, but there is little fear that the Supreme Court would overturn its 9-0 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan requiring public figures to prove “actual malice” to win a lawsuit against the press.
That’s not to say there has not been a serious human cost. At least seven journalistic sources have been prosecuted since 2017 for leaking information to the media on issues of public interest. Whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who served seven years in prison (much of it at a men’s prison in solitary confinement) for revealing state secrets has
been twice reincarcerated for refusing to testify in a grand jury trial about WikiLeaks. Freed after a sixty-two day stay, she was locked up again as this issue went to press.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has sharply criticized the U.S. indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, which could enshrine a dangerous model for future prosecutions of sources and publishers. The U.S. government subpoenaed the communications of journalist Ali Watkins in the course of a leak investigation. National security reporters around the country are saying that the aggressive prosecution of leakers is affecting their work.
The legal battle is an escalation of what we saw post-9/11: increased secrecy and classification of documents, prosecution of sources under the Espionage Act, searches of laptops and cell phones at the borders, and a surveillance regime that forces journalists to act like spies. The Obama Administration was notorious for its war on journalistic sources, jailing more leakers under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined, pursuing a nine-year legal battle to try and force journalist James Risen to give up the identity of his source, and subpoenaing records from the Associated Press.
Yet the Obama Administration ultimately declined to prosecute Assange for publishing classified documents. Other trends may have gotten worse under Trump. Denials of Freedom of Information Act requests have reached record levels. And warrantless searches of electronic devices at the borders have increased threefold, although we don’t know how many journalists are affected.
Earlier this year, we learned of a concerted effort by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in San Diego to track journalists covering the 2018 migrant caravan and subject them to a higher level of scrutiny when they crossed the border. In response, the Department of Homeland Security opened an Inspector General’s investigation into this matter.
Congress has reauthorized sweeping surveillance provisions, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the government to target foreign journalists and sweep up Americans’ communications, if they are talking with a foreign target.
For press freedom organizations and media lawyers, the sense of anxiety is palpable. The Assange case could eventually provide us with the type of headline media case and live or die courtroom battle that hearkens back to the Nixon era. But even if the media wins this case, much of the damage to press freedom under the Trump Administration cannot be undone by a judge ruling in the media’s favor.
Last year saw the deadliest day in history for American journalists. On June 28, five employees of the Capital Gazette, a local newspaper covering Annapolis, Maryland, were murdered after a gunman entered the newsroom. Wendi Winters, an editor and reporter who had spent two decades in community reporting, charged the gunman with a trash can and recycling bin, buying time for some of her colleagues to escape. Winters and her colleagues Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, and Rebecca Smith were killed in the attack. Of the eleven staffers in the office, six survived.
“We are putting out a damn paper,” they told the media that day. And that’s what they did.
The attack hit a press that already felt vulnerable. Increasingly journalists working in the United States are taking the safety precautions that used to be reserved for covering conflict overseas. An epidemic of “lone wolf” mass shootings throughout the country, combined with a palpable hostility to the press, has made journalists think twice about their own safety.
In the case of Annapolis, it would be irresponsible to tie the shooting directly to President Trump and his rhetoric. Jarrod Ramos, the alleged shooter, had sued the paper for defamation in 2012 and had previously sent threatening letters. But journalists tell us that the hostile rhetoric from this administration makes them feel less safe, whether covering Trump rallies or reporting from their own newsrooms.
After the attack, CPJ joined with other groups in calling for the President to moderate his rhetoric. Instead, he escalated. Less than a week after the shooting, he called the press “Fake News” and the “Opposition Party.” Most of the many times he has called the press the “Enemy of the People” on Twitter have occurred post-Annapolis, according to an analysis of his tweets. In October, a Florida man named Cesar Sayoc mailed pipe bombs to at least thirteen people that he labeled as critics of Trump, including two bombs that were sent to CNN.
This is not the Nixon era, where a President went to war with the press in the courts and the media won.
A month before the 2016 election, users on the website 8chan, an online message board rife with racist and vitriolic content, posted the names and home addresses of fifty journalists. In June of last year, a hashtag #dayofthebrick went viral, depicting violence against journalists.
For many journalists, the hostility toward the press is scary not only because they are afraid of being targeted, but also because it undermines their relationships with their readers and the communities they cover. Trump’s tweets are less troubling than the fact that they find fertile soil in a large swath of the public. Partisan divides over trust in media widened in the wake of the 2016 election and have remained so, according to the Pew Research Center.
There is now a 44-percentage-point difference between Republicans and Democrats on their support for the watchdog role of the press, the largest difference recorded in three decades of polling. In the long run, as a press freedom organization, we do not know what that will mean. In the past, the rights of the press have been ensured by a strong basis of bipartisan support. If we lose sight of the fact that press freedom is not a conservative or liberal issue, we risk losing those protections.
In 2017, I traveled to two Missouri cities, St. Louis and Columbia, as part of a delegation of international press freedom groups. Reporters told us about phone calls and interviews with sources where they were called “fake news,” but they also talked about the way that they would keep the conversation going and engage with the very people calling them “fake news.”
Studies show that three-quarters of Americans trust their local news. But we are caught in a vicious cycle: Over the past fifteen years, 1,800 newspapers have closed. At a time of polarization and distrust, local journalists are the ideal ambassadors for the value of a free press and accountability reporting, but there are fewer and fewer of them.
David McCraw, the deputy general counsel for The New York Times, writes in his book Truth in Our Times that the “existential threat to the press” is not the First Amendment legal battles of yesteryear but “the proliferation of fake news,” a President who spends a “breathtaking amount of time delegitimizing the press,” and a “technological revolution that disrupted the economic model that supported journalism and the singularity of voice that gave news organizations their authority and power.” McCraw, who has dedicated his career to defending the First Amendment, is brutally honest: “The First Amendment has largely nothing to say about how to fix any of that.”
Working for a press freedom organization in the age of Trump, I am often asked to assess the impact of the President on press freedom. This is not an easy task. How do you weigh the arrest of a journalist covering Standing Rock in North Dakota against a journalist receiving a rape threat over Twitter? Even if we could tally the overall state of press freedom, it would be impossible to know how many of the issues we see at the local level stem from hostility toward the press at the national level.
The truth is that Trump is just as much a symptom as a cause of the challenges facing the media in the information age. His rhetorical attacks may have put fuel on the fire of harassment campaigns, and his insinuations about invented sources may have contributed to polarization and undermined trust in the media, but these trends predate him and will exist after he is no longer in the White House.
As a press freedom group, we have adapted to the threats posed to journalists in the United States. We’ve increasingly reported on online harassment and worked with newsrooms and partner organizations to identify best standards for ensuring newsroom security. Like many free expression organizations, we engage with tech companies and platforms on ways to both protect free speech and respond to vile abuse that serves to silence journalists.
Faced with a declining commitment to international press freedom from the current administration, we’ve worked with a bipartisan coalition of legislators to push for action in individual cases of journalists imprisoned or killed abroad. In the process, we’ve shown that Trump’s rhetoric about the press does not represent the U.S. government. We continue to document the creeping threats of surveillance and secrecy, and the chilling effect on national security reporters and their sources.
But the fact is that press freedom organizations are not going to fix many of the challenges facing today’s media, nor should we try. The role of independent reporting that holds power to account is more vital than ever, but it will be up to the media and the public to find viable business models, to build trust, and to establish the relevance of this kind of reporting in the digital age.
Our job is to help journalists deal with the changing threats to their safety and their ability to report as best we can, and to be the constant guardians of the rights that we’ve already secured.