Attacks on press credibility endanger US democracy and global press freedom The Trump administration has stepped up prosecutions of news sources, interfered in the business of media owners, harassed journalists crossing U.S. borders, and empowered foreign leaders to restrict their own media. But...
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Barack Obama promised that his administration would be the most transparent in history. Instead it became
the most determined to limit information that the news media needed to hold the government accountable for its actions. It used White House websites and social media to bypass the news media in presenting its own version of reality to the public, in a precursor to how Donald Trump would later use Twitter. The Obama administration actively discouraged “unauthorized” interviews by government officials with the press, and it went to great lengths to combat leaks to reporters.
Most significantly, the Obama administration prosecuted 10 government employees and contractors for disclosing classified information to the press. Eight of the prosecutions were under the 1917 Espionage Act, which was enacted during World War I to protect the country against spies for foreign governments. It had been used only three times in the nine decades before Obama took office. In several of the cases, the Justice Department and the FBI secretly seized telephone and email traffic between sources and reporters for
The New York Times, Fox News, and The Associated Press. National security journalists told me that those investigations had a chilling effect on government sources of information.
Yet, the Obama administration “never engaged in public rhetoric against the press,” noted University of Georgia media law professor Jonathan Peters. By contrast, Peters characterized Trump’s verbal attacks on the press as “a systematic effort to de-legitimize the news media as a check on government power.”
By the time Trump was elected president in November 2016, Americans appeared to be irreconcilably divided, not just politically, ideologically, and emotionally, but factually. Poll after poll showed that supporters and opponents of Trump believed very different versions of what they think of as facts because they depend primarily on sources of news and information they trust, regardless of their veracity. “People construct their own reality from a selection of media with which they agree,” Hofstra University journalism school dean Mark Lukasiewicz told me.
A video frame shows FBI agents on October 26, 2018, pulling a tarp over a van from Plantation, Florida, covered in pro-Trump stickers. The van was investigated in connection with package bombs sent to the CNN newsroom in New York and to other perceived critics of President Trump. (WPLG-TV via AP)
Trump’s attacks on press credibility
CBS News correspondent Leslie Stahl told a Society of Professional Journalists gathering in New York in May 2018
about a chat she had with President-elect Trump, in his Trump Tower office, before a CBS “60 Minutes” interview with him in November 2016. “At one point, he started to attack the press,” Stahl said. “There were no cameras in there.
“I said, ‘You know this is getting tired. Why are you doing it over and over? It’s boring and it’s time to end that,’” Stahl recalled. “‘You know, you’ve won…why do you keep hammering at this?’”
“And he said, ‘You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so that, when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.’”
Recalling this exchange, Stahl told me at the beginning of 2020, “The thing that jumped out at me was how calculated it was. He plans it out.
“And I was wrong,” she said about what she thought then that the impact of Trump’s attacks on the press would be. “When you say something over and over, it’s had a huge impact. Repetition is part of its impact.”
