A letter to the White House, a laundry list of recommendations for the president and a 29-page report about the administration’s assault on free press are all compiled in the latest offering from the Center to Protect Journalists.
The CPJ, a non-profit founded over 30 years ago to promote “press freedom worldwide and defends the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal,” published a special report on Thursday penned by longtime Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. in which he dismantles United States President Barack Obama’s treatment of journalists with assistance from the country’s foremost national security reporters.
Despite campaigning heavily on the promise of increased government transparency and the most open administration yet, Pres. Obama’s four-and-a-half-years in the White House so far have included a number of instances cited by Downie in which reporters were investigated, whistleblowers reprimanded and administrative actions allowed for the chilling of journalism, both domestically and on a global level.
Pres. Obama “came into office pledging open government, but he has fallen short of his promise,” Downie prefaces his report.
“Journalists and transparency advocates say the White House curbs routine disclosure of information and deploys its own media to evade scrutiny by the press,” he continues, adding, “Aggressive prosecution of leakers of classified information and broad electronic surveillance programs deter government sources from speaking to journalists.”
The report and its accompanying articles and letter to the White House mark a rare occasion in which the CPJ single-out the US for infringing on press freedoms, turning away from the international examples that are usually investigated by the organization, such as journalists exiled, imprisoned or killed for doing their work, and restrictions on the open-media in more repressive countries overseas.
Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian writer who has worked closely with a trove of top-secret documents supplied to his newspaper, wrote on Twitter that he considered the report to be a “scathing indictment” of the White House’s press attacks.
Drawing on the recent examples of WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning and National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden — as well as other US citizens charged with espionage for exposing arguably egregious government initiatives with the press — Downie and his colleagues question the White House’s efforts to handle the unauthorized disclosures of classified information and the chilling effect those attempts have had on journalists around the globe.
“Six government employees, plus two contractors including Edward Snowden, have been subjects of felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act,” recalls Downie, who acknowledges that the tally of Americans indicted under that law exceeds double the total from all previous administrations combined.
Manning is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence for leaking sensitive diplomatic and military documents to WikiLeaks while serving in the US Army, and before that was held in solitary confinement in a military brig for almost a year. And Snowden — the former intelligence contractor that exposed the NSA’s vast surveillance apparatus — has resorted to accepting asylum in Russia while he battles an indictment that could carry an even harsher sentence than the soldier.
And while the government has relied on established legislation to legitimize those cases, Downie and company caution that the administration’s tactics have transformed the journalism industry as a whole thanks to frequent fear among reporters that every aspect of their lives is under surveillance.