“Some longtime trusted sources have become nervous and anxious about talking with us,” AP president and chief executive Gary Pruitt said in a speech to the National Press Club.
“In some cases, government employees we once checked in with regularly will no longer speak to us by phone. Others are reluctant to meet in person … This chilling effect on newsgathering is not just limited to AP.
“Journalists from other news organizations have personally told me that it has intimidated both official and nonofficial sources from speaking to them as well.”
Pruitt spoke one month after the US news agency revealed that it had been notified after the fact that the US Justice Department had secret subpoenas of two months of phone records from its news operations.
The AP has said US authorities appeared to have sought out the records as part of a criminal investigation into leaked information contained in a May 2012 AP story about a foiled terror plot.
Pruitt, who previously called the seizure “a massive and unprecedented intrusion” into newsgathering, said the Justice Department “violated its own rules” on how it handles investigations of leaks to news media.
He said the collection of records pertaining to more than 100 journalists was “an overbroad and sloppy fishing expedition” and failed to follow procedures on notification.
Pruitt said that authorities maintained that by notifying the AP ahead of the sweep “it would have tipped off the leaker” but argued “that kind of reasoning would apply in every single case.”
This rationale would mean news organizations would never know when its records are being obtained, news sources would become less willing to speak and “the public will only know what the government wants them to know.”