Donald Trump’s private lawsuits against ABC News, CBS News and most recently The Des Moines Register are only the first phase of his promised battle to “straighten out the press.” Once he gets back in office next month, a far more troubling phase will begin: his promised effort to use government power to force reporters to reveal their sources for national security articles he doesn’t like.
Trump hasn’t been the least bit reticent about his plans. He has repeatedly said that reporters whose work relies on confidential government sources should simply be tossed in jail until they reveal the names of their contacts. The threat of prison rape, he says, will end journalistic stubbornness once and for all. The crudeness of that particular fantasy says a lot about Trump’s cast of mind, and it also shows how little he understands about the importance that reporters place on confidentiality. But the fights he is promising are real, and the financial costs could be ruinous for small or nonprofit news organizations.
Most important, the threats that federal agents will dig through phone records and use surveillance and brutality to find leakers will make it far more difficult for whistle-blowers to tell the truth about government abuses. Trump has already made it clear that fear will be one of the principal tools he uses to reshape Washington in his image. In particular, the fear of prosecution and investigation will be explicitly used to prevent exposure of corruption, incompetence or improper use of power.
That’s why the Senate should have passed the Press Act, a bill that would protect reporters from being forced by a court to reveal their sources of information. The measure had already unanimously passed the House, but on Nov. 20, Trump issued a social media edict demanding that “Republicans must kill this bill!”
When the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, tried to pass it by unanimous consent on Dec. 10, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, blocked it. Senate Democrats say that because of Trump’s demand, they could not get the Republican votes needed to attach the bill to the spending bill that has to be passed by Friday to avert a government shutdown.
For extreme partisans like Cotton, pursuing confidential sources is a right-wing priority, since in his mind all reporters are leftists with a grudge against Republicans. “The Press Act would undermine our national security and turn liberal reporters into a protected class,” he wrote on social media last week. In fact, the bill would protect all news organizations, regardless of whether they have a political ideology. Both Fox News and The New York Times were among 108 news organizations that signed a letter urging passage of the act that was written by the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press. And the bill would allow aggressive reporting on the federal government no matter which party is in power.
If Republican senators were more concerned about the First Amendment than Trump’s dictates, they could still help Democrats pass the bill this year. But if not, and if reporters start going to jail next year, Congress will have more opportunities to stand up for the principles of the nation’s founders and prevent that abuse.
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