Fox News leak: Obama’s war on the press

last updated 8 January 2015

The Obama administration’s war against press freedom has reached a chilling new low, said J.D. Tuccille in Reason.com. It was revealed this week that the Justice Department is targeting Fox News reporter James Rosen for publishing classified information about North Korea in 2009, and has examined his phone records and emails and tracked his movements. Rosen’s transgression? He met with a State Department official who leaked to him the “non-shocking information” that North Korea would likely respond to tougher U.N. sanctions by staging more nuclear tests. A Justice Department official has called Rosen “a co-conspirator” in a criminal violation of the Espionage Act. Just a week earlier, it was revealed that the Justice Department had secretly seized two months of phone records from the Associated Press to track a different leak. Clearly, “we’re looking at a full-fledged assault on the free press.”

By this leak-obsessed administration’s standards, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post, Bob Woodward would have been jailed for his snooping on the FBI’s Watergate investigation. My colleague Dana Priest would have also been jailed for revealing the CIA’s network of secret prisons. “The president needs to understand that behavior commonly known as ‘whistle-blowing’ and ‘journalism’ must not be construed as espionage.” To appease an irate media, said Reed Richardson in TheNation.com, Obama last week announced support for resurrecting a 2009 proposal to protect reporters and their sources through a federal press shield law. But this is just “a transparent ploy at damage control.” That proposed legislation has a glaring exemption—inserted by this White House—that allows the federal government to investigate and prosecute reporters if “national security” is being endangered. So the so-called shield law Obama now claims to support wouldn’t have prevented either the AP or the Fox News investigation.

We’re not surprised, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Despite his 2008 campaign promise for transparent government, Obama’s Justice Department has used the Espionage Act to prosecute twice as many whistle-blowers and leakers as all other administrations combined. In the Fox News case, the Justice Department scrutinized reporter Rosen’s personal emails for months—proof it will use its power to punish “anyone who publishes a story the administration dislikes.” Even though the target this time is conservative Fox News, “we trust our liberal friends in the press corps won’t mute their dismay.”