Leonard Downie, a forty-year veteran at The Washington Post wrote, “The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration.” Federal investigators seized Rosen’s email logs, tracked his State Department visits and movements through his security badge, and even targeted the phone records of his parents on Staten Island. Incredibly, a week following the AP probe, the DOJ ratcheted things up even further when it named Fox News journalist James Rosen a criminal co-conspirator in a leak case involving North Korea’s intention to conduct a nuclear test in response to impending U.N. No less chilling was the 2013 Associated Press announcement that over a two-month period the Justice Department had seized phone records, without notice, of 20 telephone lines to AP offices and journalists (including cell phones and home phones) affecting more than 100 reporters-a transgression AP president Gary Pruitt deemed “a massive and unprecedented intrusion” for which there was no justification. more than all previous administrations combined”-seven times.
Obama espionage act journalists free#
Refusing to reveal his sources, Risen was subjected to a seven-year nightmare of subpoenas, responses, appeals (one rejected by the Supreme Court), and threats of imprisonment-until it was decided he would not be forced to testify after all.Ī judge in the case wrote, “The majority exalts the interests of the government while unduly trampling those of the press, and in doing so, severely impinges on the press and the free flow of information in our society.”ĬNN’s Jake Tapper was more emphatic: “The Obama administration has used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to journalists. Who can forget New York Times reporter James Risen, who was subpoenaed twice in the 2010 indictment of Jeffrey Sterling under the Espionage Act of 1917.
Most troubling is “the current administration’s obsessive control of information, which manifests itself through the war on whistleblowers and journalists’ sources, as well as the lack of government transparency.” The bad news is America was ranked 20th when Obama took office.Īccording to the RWB, the 2016 ranking improvement is relative and hides broader negative trends. The good news is the United States has improved its World Press Freedom Index by 8 points from its 2015 low-point mark of 49th. on RWB’s “ Current Enemies of the Internet” list, whose members distinguish themselves by varying degrees of news and information censorship, as well as repression of Internet users. has added the dubious distinction of joining Bahrain, China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, et al. Reporters Sans Frontières, RSF), which currently ranks the United States 41st in its 2016 World Press Freedom Index - a compendium of 180 countries measured for their freedom of the press, the media, and information.Įvaluated by the criteria of pluralism, media independence, legislative framework, abuses, media environment and self-censorship, transparency, and the quality of the infrastructure that supports the production of news and information, America languishes below Tonga, Ghana, Latvia, Uruguay, Namibia, Slovakia, Costa Rica, and thirty-three other countries.Īnd since 2014, the U.S. So, too, is Reporters Without Borders (a.k.a. Now eight years later, in the final overcast days of the Obama presidency, we are still waiting for his “new era of openness” to materialize. To underscore his sincerity, he invoked Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ oft-quoted maxim: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” Referencing the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), he opined, “A democracy requires accountability and accountability requires transparency,” and FOIA represented “the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open Government.” to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration.
On January 21, 2009, President Barack Obama issued a memorandum committing his administration “to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.
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