The White House is at war with reporters, but Trump didn’t start it. By Julie Mason
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/The-White-House-is-at-war-with-reporters-but-13199382.php
President Trump’s sustained war on the news media is loud and destructive and surely must be the worst, most unprecedented attack on the Fourth Estate in modern history.
Not so fast. On a few significant fronts, Trump is following a trail blazed by President Obama in undermining openness and press freedom. And Trump’s newfound willingness to use the Justice Department to surveil journalists and sniff out their sources is right out of the Obama playbook.
Meanwhile, the tweets keep coming. “If you are weeding out Fake News, there is nothing so Fake as CNN & MSNBC, & yet I do not ask that their sick behavior be removed. I get used to it and watch with a grain of salt, or don’t watch at all,” Trump tweeted recently.Since taking office, Trump has had only one, full-length press conference at the White House. His own legal and administrative headaches probably preclude a repeat performance any time soon.
Drawing the most attention are Trump’s darker pronouncements — journalists are “nasty,” they are “enemies of the people,” and maybe some should see their licenses revoked. Journalist Ken Vogel of the New York Times is one of several to receive chilling death threats, apparently from Trump supporters.
“You are the enemy of the people,” a caller said on voicemail shared by Vogel last week. “And although the pen might be mightier than the sword, the pen is not mightier than the AK-47.”
Trump recently escalated from trash-talk to legal action, deploying the Justice Department to seize without notice six years’ worth of email and phone records from four reporters in order to smoke out a source whose information reflected badly on Trump.
Where did he ever get that idea? On his way out of Washington at the end of his second term, Obama gave a valedictory address in the White House briefing room, praising the work of journalists in watch-dogging the government.
“America needs you and our democracy needs you,” Obama said. “Having you in this building has made this place work better. It keeps us honest, it makes us work harder.”
Worthy sentiments, but a stark contrast to Obama’s disappointing record on press freedom and access. His White House subverted the press in a number of ways while touting themselves as the most transparent in history.
Two-time Pulitzer Prize winning national security reporter James Risen wrote presciently in the New York Times that, “If Donald J. Trump decides as president to throw a whistle-blower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, or gets the F.B.I. to spy on a journalist, he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama.”
The Obama White House routinely blocked news photographers’ from official events, preserving exclusive access for the president’s own image-makers. The resulting photos in were the only ones available of Obama acting as president, and many news organizations refused to use them.
Obama rarely took questions from reporters and went months between press conferences, preferring one-on-one interviews with television reporters and anchors, a setup that allowed him more control.
He broke a promise to make his schedule public, and his staff repeatedly scrubbed public visitor logs to conceal the names of White House visitors.
The administration dramatically slowed Freedom of Information Act processing, amassing the worst record in history for fulfilling requests from citizens and journalists for public records.
Worse, Obama used federal prosecutors to go after news sources. After campaigning as a reformer who would protect whistleblowers, Obama made greater use of the Espionage Act to prosecute leakers and menace journalists than all other presidents combined.
Obama’s Justice Department in 2010 infiltrated the private email of Fox News reporter James Rosen, who was reporting on North Korea. The administration also seized personal records from Rosen’s colleagues and parents.
In 2013 Obama’s Justice Department seized phone records of the Associated Press, secretly collecting information covering more than 20 telephone lines of reporters and editors including their work, home and cell phones.
The New York Times’ Risen, who fought the administration to protect his own sources, got so deep in his legal battle with Obama that he selected a reading list of of Civil War books to study in prison before the government finally backed off their case.
In a bleak episode of unintended irony, an open-government group gave Obama an award for transparency in an Oval Office ceremony closed to the press.
By 2015 and under pressure from industry and watchdog groups, the Obama administration reformed its policies for investigating news sources and journalists — but an extremely troubling precedent had been established.
These days, amid Trump’s florid insults and threats to the press, it is received as a pedantic heresy to mention that, by the way, Obama was pretty bad too. In truth, Trump is just more obvious, and he’s only getting started.
Trump certainly seems well-positioned to finish worse on press issues than Obama — his Justice Department is believed to be pursuing dozens of new leak investigations. And White House reporters receiving threatening voicemail this week could soon enough be picking out their own prison reading lists. But historic perspective is crucial, especially these days when the term “unprecedented” is getting such a steady workout. Trump’s war on journalists didn’t spring out of nowhere.
Mason hosts “The Press Pool” on SiriusXM’s POTUS channel. She is a veteran White House reporter and a former elected board member of the White House Correspondents’ Association. She spent 20 years at the Houston Chronicle.
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