The Obama administration's newfound support for a federal media shield law is a transparent attempt to toss the whistleblower and journalist communities a bone after putting them under assault with secret subpoenas and Espionage Act prosecutions for the past several years. It should not have taken widespread bi-partisan outrage over the Justice Department's secretly obtaining records for 20 different phone lines potentially impacting over 100 journalists for the Obama administration to suddenly suggest reviving the same media shield law that the administration had a significant hand in killing the last time the law moved in Congress.
The Obama administration's support for a reporter shield law is a positive step, but it in no way excuses all of the leaps and bounds the administration has away from transparency and accountability. The administration's newfound support is conveniently-timed to distract from the fact that main-stream-media has finally realized that the Obama administration is waging war on the First Amendment through Justice Department targeting of whistleblowers and journalists and the IRS admittedly targeting conservative groups. These full-on attacks on Americans' ability to speak, read, and express their political beliefs - rights enshrined in the First Amendment - should be unacceptable to any President, even more so to a constitutional scholar. WaPo's Dana Milbank wrote:
In both cases, Americans are being punished and intimidated for exercising their right of free expression — by the taxing authorities, in the conservatives’ case, and by federal prosecutors, in the reporters’ case.
But instead of addressing these assaults head on, Obama has claimed he only "read about them in the press," (
a position Jon Stewart rightly lambasted him for), and Attorney General Eric Holder testified yesterday that he didn't know when the AP subpoenas were issued, didn't know when he recused himself from the AP case, didn't put the recusal in writing, didn't know why the Deputy Attorney General was free from the same conflict that led to Holder's recusal, and didn't have the "factual basis" to answer any questions about the Justice Department's unprecedented intrusion on the freedom of the press.
On and on Holder went: “I don’t know. I don’t know. . . . I would not want to reveal what I know. . . . I don’t know why that didn’t happen. . . . I know nothing, so I’m not in a position really to answer.”
The head of the Justice Department cannot answer for the Justice Department's actions. The President learns of the Executive branch's chilling intrusions on freedom of the press from the press, irony abounds. If Obama wants credit for supporting for the shield law, then the administration should start taking responsibility for its anti-speech actions like the unprecedented use of the Espionage Act to pursue so-called "leakers," who are really whistleblowers and the Justice Department digging into journalists' phone records in apparent violation of its own regulations.
For an administration that has launched a war on information using the criminal justice system, and more specifically the heavy-handed Espionage Act, to intimidate whistleblowers and so-called "leak investigations" to subpoena reporters' phone records and testimony about their sources, the sudden White House support for a reporter shield law would be a little more credible if the legislation didn't include a gaping exception for all things national security.
Cases involving the disclosure of classified information would be more heavily tilted toward the government.
All of the Espionage Act cases, and the "leak investigation" that precipitated the subpoenas for AP journalists' phone records involve classified information. Moreover, given the rampant over-classification plaguing the classification system, the pervasive tendency to over-classify information and to "classify" any embarrassing or illegal government conduct, and the fact that the Justice Department has a track record of claiming information is properly classified when in fact it was not (
See case against National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Thomas Drake), there is no doubt the Obama administration will not hesitate to take advantage of the loophole and throw out "national security" as an excuse to skirt regulations or assert unprecedented Executive power. National security loophole aside, the proposed shield law
wouldn't prevent the Justice Department from using National Security Letters to spy on journalists without Court oversight.
Criticizing the government, embarrassing the government, or exposing government illegality should not subject you to targeting, monitoring or prosecution from any government agency. That's a concept that should be a no-brainer for a country with the First Amendment, but the current administration needs a significant tutorial on the subject.