This spring, Jonathan Peters took a look at the trickle-down impact of President Trump’s aggressive war on the media for the Columbia Journalism Review. So far, Trump’s attacks on the national media have resulted in increased readership, subscriptions, ratings, and donations for many news organizations. However, those benefits have only extended to the national media. When Peters spoke with five press freedom experts, including Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, he had this to say:
“When [Trump] belittles, attacks, and undermines journalists, that creates a new norm that has global repercussions as well as local ones. His rhetoric normalizes press freedom abuses at the state and local levels.”
And almost as confirmation, during his visit to the state capitol in Charleston, West Virginia, a couple of weeks ago, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was repeatedly asked if domestic violence would be considered a pre-existing condition under the GOP’s revised health care plan. The question was asked repeatedly because, as Price was walking down the capitol hallway with Kellyanne Conway, he refused to answer it.
Dan Heyman, a journalist working for Public News Service out of Denver, Colorado, persisted, and claimed that he “reached past those accompanying Price with his phone and repeatedly asked his healthcare question"—and was arrested by the West Virginia Capitol Police for his trouble.
From The Hill’s report of the incident:
According to the criminal complaint by the capitol police, Heyman was "aggressively breaching the secret service agents to the point where the agents were forced to remove him a couple of times from the area walking up the hallway in the main building of the Capitol. The defendant was causing a disturbance by yelling at Ms. Conway and Secretary Price.”
So for attempting to do his job, Dan Heyman was charged with “willful disruption of governmental processes” which is apparently a thing in West Virginia. Charged with a misdemeanor, Heyman was released after posting a $5,000 bond. Sec. Price later praised the law enforcement officers.
The relationship between the American president and the press has long been a contentious one, going all of the way back to George Washington, who was bedeviled by none other than Benjamin Franklin Bache (grandson of Benjamin Franklin) in his Philadelphia paper, the Aurora. This is part of what was published by that paper on the day of John Adams’ inauguration:
“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation,” was the pious ejaculation of a man who beheld a flood of happiness rushing in upon mankind. If ever there was a time which would license the reiteration of this exclamation, that time is now arrived; for the man who is the source of all the misfortunes of our country is this day reduced to a level with his fellow-citizens, and is no longer possessed of power to multiply evils upon the United States. If ever there was a period of rejoicing, this is the moment. Every heart in unison with the freedom and happiness of the people, ought to beat high with exultation that the name of Washington from this day ceased to give a currency to political iniquity and to legalized corruption.
John Adams went on to try and shut down the voice of Bache under the highly political Sedition Act of 1798. That act was allowed to expire under the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, but the Alien Enemies Act remains with us today, and was used by President Franklin Roosevelt to inter American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. And it has been used lately against whistleblowers who attempt to inform the American pubic of possible wrongdoing by their government. Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed what became known as the Pentagon Papers, presents a compelling argument against the use of the Alien Enemies Act here.
The whole question of the leaking of information to the press is a sticky one as the government, especially the Executive Branch, tends to intentionally leak information, either as trial balloons on policy issues or as an attempt to control the media narrative. That’s why so few leakers are ever prosecuted. As David Pozen wrote in "The Leaky Leviathan: Why the Government Condemns and Condones Unlawful Disclosures of Information”:
The great secret about the U.S. government’s notorious leakiness is that it is a highly adaptive mechanism of information control, which has been refined through a nuanced system of social norms. The great secret about the laws against leaking is that they have never been used in a manner designed to stop leaking — and that their implementation threatens not just gauzy democratic ideals but practical bureaucratic imperatives, not just individual whistleblowers but the institution of the presidency.
The government needs leakers as much as the media does, although for admittedly different reasons. The press has a role in a democracy, one that it has filled for a very long time:
In 1841, Thomas Carlyle wrote, “Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all” (On Heroes and Hero Worship). Four years earlier, Carlyle had used the phrase in his French Revolution: “A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, springs up, increases and multiplies; irrepressible, incalculable.” Carlyle saw the press as instrumental to the birth and growth of democracy, spreading facts and opinions and sparking revolution against tyranny.
Today, a single party with the morals of an alley cat controls both houses of Congress, the executive branch, and a majority of the Supreme Court. The Republican Party has made it clear that their obsession with reducing the tax burden of the already wealthy and destroying the institutions of governance that have been built over almost 250 years has taken precedence over every shred of patriotism, honor, or service to country. Their obsession even trumps the oath that they took to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Evidence of this is shown by the absence of any desire to investigate foreign interference with a presidential election.
As a result of the continuing GOP obstruction, what we know about the work of the current administration is thanks to leakers and to the fourth estate who give them a platform. We can maintain an almost daily tracking of the mental meanderings of the president via Twitter, but for the actions of the president, we have to turn to the media.
It is pretty obvious that we would know much less about the workings of the Trump White House had President Trump not launched an undeclared war against the intelligence community. Even before he took office, he compared the men and women who work in that community to Nazis—not a particularly clever way to gain access to information from them. That would be significant if he ever looked to the intelligence community for actual intelligence. Instead, he has elevated a conspiracy theorist who lurked on the outer fringes of reality to center stage, frequently repeating the absurd accusations of the far right cesspool.
Unable to communicate intelligence to the president without pictures and graphs, his briefers have learned to include his name as often as possible in order to maintain his child-like attention span. (He likes to read his own name, apparently.) How do we know this? It has been leaked to the press.
We have learned that former FBI Director James Comey kept notes of his meetings and conversations with Donald Trump and that at least one of those shows the president interfering with the investigation of disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn. How do we know this? Not as the result of any congressional investigation, but because it has been leaked to the press.
Interestingly, Republican Sen. Richard Burr, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, feels no shame in his failure to investigate this issue, and according to a PBS Newshour report:
Burr said the burden of proof, in this case, is on the New York Times. “If they’re reporting it, and they’ve got somebody who has got the document, they need to get the document and get it released.”
Because the New York Times has the exact same subpoena powers as the Senate, obviously. Sadly no one other than Sen. Burr, apparently, is aware of the Times ever being granted this ability. It’s a shame the Senate can’t actually do its job since it already has the power to subpoena documents of this nature.
And so Donald Trump will continue to attack the media for publishing the information that members of his administration are freely sharing with them. It was during one of those meetings with former Director Comey that he expressed his desire to see journalists in jail for doing their jobs as members of the fourth estate. In the past, for the most part, the federal government has only successfully prosecuted the leakers under various laws, including the Enemies Act. The press protections under the First Amendment have repeatedly been upheld by the Supreme Court.
In March, Trump took to Twitter to express his dissatisfaction with the coverage he had received.
According to the New York Times’ report, he was more explicit while on the campaign trail:
“I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money,” Mr. Trump said. “We’re going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.”
As the Times goes on to explain, libel laws are written by the states, subject to the protections guaranteed by the Supreme Court under the First Amendment and the 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan. In order for him to succeed in a libel case, Trump would not only have to prove that the libel was written with malicious intent, he would have to show that the libel would actually damage his “good reputation, honestly earned.” As the lawyer for the New York Times wrote:
“The essence of a libel claim, of course, is the protection of one’s reputation,” Mr. McCraw wrote. But Mr. Trump’s reputation in this area, Mr. McCraw said, could not have been harmed by The Times’s report in light of, for instance, Mr. Trump’s own statements about groping women.
“Nothing in our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself,” Mr. McCraw wrote.
Nevertheless, he will continue to complain about the coverage of his administration by the media, as he did last week.
“Look at the way I’ve been treated lately, especially by the media,” Trump said on Wednesday during a speech to the Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut. “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.”
Hopefully, his complaints and threats will not intimidate a newly-awakened national press corps, but local reporters will still have to deal with the trickle-down impact of his words. Reporters like Dan Heyman, unfortunately, will likely continue to face abuses by the reinvigorated right-wing local and state governments.
There are a lot of reasons to get Donald Trump out of our government—and the protection of the fourth estate may be one of the more important ones.