{"id":70919,"date":"2025-02-20T16:20:11","date_gmt":"2025-02-21T00:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=70919"},"modified":"2025-02-20T16:20:11","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T00:20:11","slug":"under-trump-press-freedom-under-heat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=70919","title":{"rendered":"Under Trump, Press Freedom Under Heat"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Selen Ozturk<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Three weeks into Trump\u2019s second presidency, press freedom is in danger for newsrooms nationwide.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Three weeks into Trump\u2019s second presidency, press freedom is in danger for newsrooms nationwide.<\/p>\n

San Francisco radio station KCBS is facing a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigation after broadcasting information about an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation; Associated Press journalists are barred from White House events after refusing to follow Trump\u2019s executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America; and major media houses like ABC and CBS faced Trump\u00a0lawsuits<\/a>\u00a0even before he took office.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat power is the FCC asserting? It appears to be a claim that reporting the news is not in the public interest if the government doesn\u2019t like what news is being reported,\u201d said David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition at a Friday, February 14 Ethnic Media Services briefing about recent press freedom threats.<\/p>\n

The FCC primarily regulates broadcast media like radio and television. Print and digital content is beyond its jurisdiction.<\/p>\n

The organization\u2019s authority depends on a \u201cpublic interest\u201d standard \u2014 rooted in the Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of 1934, when airwaves were scarce \u2014 requiring broadcasters to operate in a way that serves the public interest.<\/p>\n

In laws, lawsuits and regulations since then, however Congress, courts and the FCC itself have been\u00a0unclear<\/a>\u00a0on the meaning and scope of \u201cpublic interest.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018The process is the punishment\u2019<\/h2>\n

In a case toeing this gray area of public interest last January, Trump\u2019s new FCC chair Brendan Carr\u00a0ordered<\/a>\u00a0an investigation of NPR and PBS for \u201cbroadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not the government\u2019s business to dictate what the press reports, or how \u2026 and who is doing what on the government dime is, by definition, public business and newsworthy,\u201d said Loy. \u201cThere\u2019s a reason that the press is the only private institution expressly named in the Constitution, where the First Amendment guarantees its freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe process is the punishment when it comes to freedom of speech,\u201d he continued. \u201cI think the most pernicious danger is self-censorship, and this is not just a red state or federal issue. Local officials have been threatening reporters for years,\u201d with many recent instances in California alone.<\/p>\n

In May 2019, for example, San Francisco police obtained a warrant to raid the home of a freelance journalist \u2014 taking a sledgehammer to his gate and seizing his computers, phones and other devices \u2014 after he refused to name a source related to the death of San Francisco public defender Jeff Adachi that February.<\/p>\n

In April 2022, a Los Angeles County sheriff gave a press conference calling for the investigation of an LA Times journalist who reported on a leaked video of a deputy kneeling on the head of a handcuffed inmate for several minutes.<\/p>\n

Last December, a San Joaquin County sheriff\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0that journalists who legally obtained county Superior Court documents could face criminal prosecution for having \u201cconspired to break the law.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis erosion of norms and legal safeguards for journalists is part of a global trend,\u201d said Joel Simon, founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. \u201cThere\u2019s not a lot of examples where press freedom has declined and then rebounded \u2026 Once your rights deteriorate, it\u2019s very difficult to reclaim them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Press freedom violations in the U.S. are even older than the country itself, spanning landmark cases including a 1734 libel suit against a publisher by New York\u2019s colonial governor; the 1798 Sedition Act criminalizing criticism of the government, repealed two years later; and President Nixon\u2019s far more recent Watergate breach in 1972.<\/p>\n

\u2018Defending our ability to do our work\u2019<\/h2>\n

\u201cWhat makes these issues potentially more damaging now is that the institutional power of the media is greatly diminished,\u201d said Simon. \u201cDuring the first Trump administration, the battle was over who controls the narrative. That\u2019s not where we are now. Now, we have to focus on defending our ability to do our work. If we don\u2019t, we\u2019re going to see those rights erode.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOutside the U.S., a lot of legal harassment targeting media is not related to the production of content, but other things like tax issues, fraud allegations and workplace practices,\u201d he explained, recommending that U.S. journalists brace themselves for the same.<\/p>\n

Legal resources for journalists include pro bono aid through\u00a0Lawyers for Reporters<\/a>,\u00a0ProJourn<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press<\/a>\u00a0(RCFP), and legal hotlines through\u00a0RCFP<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0First Amendment Coalition<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cSelf-censorship is not good because people will not get the news. It\u2019s as simple as that,\u201d said Zach Press, senior staff attorney at Lawyers for Reporters at the Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice. \u201cThe question we should ask ourselves is: What measures do we put in place to have the confidence to do that reporting?\u201d<\/p>\n

He added that with Trump\u2019s attacks on this confidence, Lawyers for Reporters has seen an increase in \u201cstrategic lawsuits against public participation,\u201d or SLAPPs; these are lawsuits brought by people and entities to dissuade negative publicity by forcing the critics accused to spend extensive time and money on defense.<\/p>\n

The good news?<\/p>\n

In recent years, many states have adopted anti-SLAPP laws, almost all involving fee shifting \u2014 meaning that if, for example, a court dismisses a case or rules against the suing plaintiff, that plaintiff must pay the defendant\u2019s lawyer fees and possibly even more in damages.<\/p>\n

Adopting states include Virginia in 2017; Colorado, Virginia and Texas in 2019; New York in 2020; Washington in 2021; Kentucky and Arizona in 2022; Pennsylvania and Minnesota in 2024; and Ohio last January.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a very strong deterrent,\u201d said Press of the laws. \u201cIf the plaintiff knows they\u2019ll be on the hook for a claim they just wanted to raise to shame a journalist, maybe they\u2019ll think twice about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Against SLAPP and other threats, he encouraged journalists to make their work as factually, digitally and legally bulletproof as possible through extensive editorial fact-checking; media liability insurance; encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Telegram; and \u2014 especially for nonprofits, which comprise many local media \u2014 updated tax and employment filings.<\/p>\n

Through actions like these, \u201cpress freedom begins at home,\u201d added Loy. \u201cI can\u2019t guarantee that the FCC or any other arm of government will not attempt to abuse its power, but autocracy depends on acquiescence.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIgnore your rights and they will go away. The best way to stand up to a bully is to fight a bully,\u201d he continued. \u201cYes, there are risks \u2026 but the press should not allow those risks to prevent it from fulfilling its function: to report the news.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BySelen Ozturk Feb 20, 2025 Three...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70919"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70920,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70919\/revisions\/70920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=70919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=70919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}