The DOJ thinks news is contraband
By treating source materials as contraband, the DOJ is putting both journalism and democracy at risk.
[Seth Stern at the Freedom of the Press Foundation]
This Freedom of the Press piece is highly relevant to how one might think about source materials in any kind of newsroom that accepts tips from others. It might not be obvious to outsiders, but newsrooms don’t facilitate tips directly from sources: material has to be volunteered without participation from the newsroom. Aside from generic instructions, nobody’s helping sources to do it.
A Biden-era precedent, now leapt on enthusiastically by the Trump administration, has begun to treat those materials as contraband regardless of how they were obtained. It’s also expanded that definition to include interviews with anyone who’s not approved to speak on the record. That line of thinking justified the raid on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, where they took terabytes of data. Natanson had, just a month prior, published her account of being an engagement reporter whose job included receiving tips from the federal government. In more normal times, that account would not have made her a target.
It was previously found, in the aftermath of Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers case, that newsrooms could publish information that was leaked to them. That’s a vital foundation for journalism and a free press, and therefore our ability to make informed democratic decisions. But this new precedent undermines that principle, and therefore our ability to understand the world around us. As the Freedom of the Press Foundation put it:
“The Pentagon Papers case stands for the proposition that the government cannot suppress the publication of truthful information of public concern, even when it would very much like to. The contraband theory is an attempt to achieve the suppression indirectly — by redefining journalists’ work product as something illicit that the government can confiscate.”
As they point out in the piece, legislation is in the works to rein these abuses in, and the judge in a pending court case has the opportunity to stand up for the First Amendment and a free press.
But there’s everything to play for. In the current political environment it’s not a slam dunk that our right to understand the world around us through investigative journalism will be upheld. We need it to be if we want to have any hope of holding people with power accountable.
[Link]
