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 Trumpâs most effective ploy has been to destroy the credibility of the press, dangerously undermining truth and consensus even as the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to kill tens of thousands of Americans. A special report by Leonard Downie Jr. for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Published April 16, 2020
WASHINGTON, D.C. When President Donald J. Trump initially minimized the danger of the COVID-19 virus in the first two months of 2020, he attacked news media reporting about the growing threat and his administrationâs slow response. âLow Ratings Fake News MSDNC (Comcast) & @CNN are doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible,â the president tweeted on February 26, implying that MSNBC is allied with the Democratic Party.
On March 8, after more press reports about shortcomings in the administrationâs response, Trump tweeted, âThe Fake News Media is doing everything possible to make us look bad. Sad!â The next day, after the Dow Jones Index lost 2,014 points, or 7.79 percent, of its value, the president also blamed it on âfake news.â In a March 18 tweet, Trump insisted, âI always treated the Chinese Virus very seriouslyâ and âthe Fake News new narrative is disgraceful & false.â At contentious White House COVID-19 press briefings on March 19 and 20, he again angrily attacked the news media, saying that âthe press is very dishonestâ in its reporting on his handling of the crisis and that journalists âtruly do hurt our country.â
It was all typical of the Trump presidencyâs unprecedented hostility toward the press. Trump has habitually attacked the news media in rallies, responses to reportersâ questions, and many hundreds of tweets. He has repeatedly called the press âfake news,â âthe enemy of the people,â âdishonest,â âcorrupt,â âlow life reporters,â âbad people,â âhuman scumâ and âsome of the worst human beings youâll ever meet.â As Trump told Leslie Stahl of CBS News shortly after he was elected president in 2016, he has been trying to destroy the credibility of the news mediaâs reporting about him.
âI believe that President Trump is engaged in the most direct sustained assault on freedom of the press in our history,â Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said at a Society of Professional Journalists press freedom event in Washington on December 11, 2019. âHe has done everything he can to undercut the media, to try and delegitimize us, and I think his purpose is clear: to raise doubts, when we report critically about him and his administration, that we can be trusted.â
In response to Trumpâs steady stream of verbal attacks, members of the press were regularly booed at Trump rallies, and reporters named in his tweets have been repeatedly harassed online. There also have been credible threats to news organizations, with CNN frequently targeted.
The presidentâs press secretaries, other White House aides and administration officials, along with Trumpâs allies in Congress also repeatedly attacked the press, often parroting the presidentâs language. Along with Trumpâs thousands of documented false statements and his promotion of discredited conspiracy theories, the administrationâs attacks on the credibility of the news media have dangerously undermined truth and consensus in a deeply divided country.
âWe now have some of the best news organizations that the world has known,â said Paul Steiger, former editor of The Wall Street Journal, founder of the ProPublica nonprofit news organization, and former chair of Committee to Protect Journalistsâ board of directors. âBut Trump has created a climate in which the best news, most fact-checked news is not being believed by many people.â
The Trump administration has threatened the work of the American press in other ways. The Justice Department has stepped up investigations and prosecutions of journalistsâ sources of classified government information, while Trump and his attorneys general have refused to rule out prosecuting reporters themselves. The Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency has questioned journalists at border posts, searched their electronic devices, and monitored their movements in a secret database.
Trump himself has called for boycotts of news organizations and changes in libel law to punish the press. His re-election campaign sued The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN for libel for opinions expressed by their columnists and contributors. He tried unsuccessfully to take away White House press credentials from journalists and news organizations whose questions and stories he did not like. He encouraged federal government interference in the businesses of the owners of CNN, the traditional broadcast networks, and The Washington Post.

As threatening as all of that has been for the news media, Trumpâs attacks have had the most success in eroding the credibility of the American press among his many millions of supporters. A major Pew Research Center study in late 2019 showed that a plurality of Republicans consistently distrusted most of the news media (except for Trump-supporting media like Fox News), while pluralities of Democrats tended to trust them. In a Pew survey conducted in mid-March, 62% of respondents said the news media had exaggerated the risks from the COVID-19 virus.
Some expert observers fear an existential threat to American freedom of the press. âTrump disrespects the press as a core democratic institution,â University of Utah media law professor RonNell Anderson Jones told me. She said that American news media are dependent on citizensâ acceptance of its First Amendment role. If that erodes, she warned, âfreedom of the press is in peril.â
âPresident Trumpâs attacks on the press are an assault on the validity of the enterprise itself,â Frank Sesno, a former CNN cable news anchor who directs George Washington Universityâs School of Media and Public Affairs, said in an interview for this report. âIt is an Orwellian barrage of dehumanizing language about the purpose of the job, people who do the job and the organizations that employ them. It is a continuing assault on a free press – and on the publicâs right to know and the publicâs understanding of the role of the press in a democracy.â
Trumpâs attacks also appear to have empowered autocratic foreign leaders to discredit and restrict the press in their own countries. âWhen the president calls the press the enemy of the people, he encourages every autocrat, every dictator who wants to shut down freedom of the press. Theyâre validated,â said Sesno, who works with news media in Eastern European countries. âIt reverberates around the world.â
The president has personally orchestrated and dominated media information about his administration through tens of thousands of tweets and dozens of encounters with the press in which he chooses the reporters and the questions to which he will respond. By the count of The Washington Postâs Fact Checker team, Trump had made 16,241 false or misleading claims in all those communications in his first three years in office.
At the same time, until the COVID-19 crisis, the Trump administration restricted most on-the-record access to White House and administration officials other than the president. Traditional daily briefings for the press disappeared for many months at a time at the White House and the State and Defense departments, and officials often refused to speak on the record in interviews. Only during the COVID-19 pandemic were daily on the record briefings held for the news media, led by Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
In response, reporters developed confidential sources of information inside the White House and government departments for revelatory stories. Trump then called those stories âfake newsâ and claimed that their âanonymous sourcesâ did not exist. When Trump attacked those stories and the reporters who wrote them, his supporters often targeted the journalists with online insults and vitriol.
âThere are less people on the record now in the Trump administration,â said Anita Kumar, Politicoâs White House correspondent. âWeâre not making things up, but people donât believe us.â
In this report, I will examine the impact of Trumpâs attacks on the credibility of the American press; his administrationâs restrictions on access to government information; the presidentâs veracity; his legal challenges to the work of the news media; the presidentâs attempted interference in the financial independence of some media owners; and the impact on the press in other countries. I also will explore what journalists and media law experts say about how the press should respond.
I interviewed for this report nearly 40 journalists, press freedom advocates, journalism school deans, media lawyers and professors, and administration officials. I relied on extensive research by Stephanie Sugars of the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of CPJ and the Freedom of the Press Foundation. I talked to Michael Dubke, Trumpâs former White House director of communications. However, repeated requests for a response to Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary whose departure was announced April 7, and her deputy, Hogan Gidley, went unanswered.

Presidents and the press
Trumpâs behavior reminds me of Richard Nixonâs public verbal attacks on the press when I was one of the editors working on The Washington Postâs investigation of Watergate. In addition, Nixon ordered illegal wiretaps and FBI investigations of several reporters, and the White House maintained a political âenemies listâ that included newspaper and television journalists. White House tape recordings eventually revealed that Nixon also often raged against the press in Oval Office conversations with his aides, calling reporters âclownsâ and âsons of bitches.â
âEven though attacks by the Nixon White House on the press involved criminal acts, some of which eventually lead to Nixonâs impeachment, Trumpâs attacks are arguably more pernicious and damaging to the free press,â Michael Conway, counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in the Nixon impeachment inquiry, wrote on the NBC news website in November 2019. âTrump is seeking, and to a startling degree succeeding, in discrediting the entire media profession by declaring the press to be âenemies of the people.ââ
The administrations of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both courted the press, although Bill and Hillary Clinton resented reporting about their Arkansas business dealings, the presidentâs affair with Monica Lewinsky, and his impeachment. They were particularly unhappy with The Washington Post, where, as executive editor, I directed that coverage. But the Clintonsâ anger about some stories, journalists, and news organizations never evolved into blanket diatribes against the news media.
George W. Bush was personally friendly with reporters, and officials in his administration were accessible to the press. At the same time, they were notably disciplined in their messaging, which included false justifications for the invasion of Iraq after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In addition, during the CIAâs covert worldwide âwar on terror,â intelligence agencies and the Justice Department began aggressive investigations of classified information âleaksâ to the news media. Later, those investigations would lead to unprecedented prosecutions of journalistsâ sources by the Obama and Trump administrations.
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 âunauthorizedâ 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 ânever engaged in public rhetoric against the press,â noted University of Georgia media law professor Jonathan Peters. By contrast, Peters characterized Trumpâs verbal attacks on the press as âa systematic effort to de-legitimize the news media as a check on government power.â
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. âPeople construct their own reality from a selection of media with which they agree,â Hofstra University journalism school dean Mark Lukasiewicz told me.

Trumpâs 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 â60 Minutesâ interview with him in November 2016. âAt one point, he started to attack the press,â Stahl said. âThere were no cameras in there.
âI said, âYou know this is getting tired. Why are you doing it over and over? Itâs boring and itâs time to end that,ââ Stahl recalled. ââYou know, youâve wonâŚwhy do you keep hammering at this?ââ
âAnd he said, âYou 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.ââ
Recalling this exchange, Stahl told me at the beginning of 2020, âThe thing that jumped out at me was how calculated it was. He plans it out.
âAnd I was wrong,â she said about what she thought then that the impact of Trumpâs attacks on the press would be. âWhen you say something over and over, itâs had a huge impact. Repetition is part of its impact.â
Trumpâs attacks on the press in his encounters with journalists at the White House âcan be frustrating up close,â Mike Bender, The Wall Street Journalâs White House correspondent, said. âHe has some legitimate complaints about the press, but often itâs a political tool. Heâs eager to interact with the press – to have us close to him – but then the attacks begin.â
Michael Dubke, who served as Trumpâs White House director of communications at the beginning of 2017, told me that part of the reason for Trumpâs attacks on the press and his characterization of the news as fake âis his frustration with how the press has reported on him.â
âThere have been no stories on the progress he made with the economy and foreign policy,â Dubke contended. âThe stories have been very negative at best.â
âHe also was surprised,â added Dubke, now a Republican strategic communications consultant. âThe president felt that he had a good relationship with the press as a New York developer. He has always been available to the press.â
Lucy Dalglish, dean of the University of Marylandâs Philip Merrill College of Journalism, said that whatever Trumpâs intention at the outset, the effect of his denigrations is clear. âEven if it wasnât a malevolent purpose at the beginning, itâs become one,â she said. âWhen you travel around the country, you hear people talk about âfake news.â It has done substantial damage.â
Trump devoted increasing amounts of time to angrily denouncing the press at his large rallies of ardent supporters around the country, encouraging the boisterous crowds to react. He regularly pointed to the mass of reporters, photographers, and videographers penned up in the raised press section behind the crowd, prompting people to turn around, boo, and shout things like, âCNN sucks.â
âWeâre always in the spotlight at a rally when the crowd responds to him,â said Politicoâs Kumar. âWhen the crowd is right next to the press, weâre getting booed, and people are saying mean things to us.â
Fox Business Network reporter Kristina Partsinevelos was in the packed press section when Trump announced that he would run for re-election at a huge rally in the Amway Center arena in Orlando, Florida, on June 18, 2019. â[At] several points throughout the night, not just from President Trump, everybody that spoke before him, did call out the media,â she later told Howard Kurtz on his âMedia Buzzâ program on Fox News. âThe entire crowd turned to boo. One guy was taunting a reporter next to me, and I didnât even know what network he was from.â
In a March 2018 panel discussion that I moderated, Washington Post White House reporter Ashley Parker recalled how Trump had named her and New York Times White House reporter Maggie Haberman at a large rally in San Diego, after they had each written a story he did not like. âWeâre in the middle of this room of 10,000 people or more, and he starts complaining about our story. âThereâs a woman called Parker and a woman named Haberman, and they wrote the mostâ – and I actually had a little name card that I quickly slid my laptop over – âtheyâre the most dishonest and the most despicable – theyâre not here, are they?â And the whole crowd turns around, âBoo, hiss! Is Parker here?â
âThe good part about being a print reporter is that no one knows who I am,â Parker said at the time. âA lot of my good friends who are on TV, especially women, felt a lot more vitriol. This has been reported, but CNN and other outlets got security for their female reporters to walk to their cars after rallies.â
âIâve had people post my parentsâ address,â CNN White House correspondent Abby Phillip said at the panel discussion, adding that a conservative writer posted a story about her mother, âincluding posting her photo online, in an attempt to attack me for coverage of a Trump surrogate. That kind of thing has really escalated.â
Even though Trump has never attacked her, Politicoâs Kumar said, âI have felt more animosity than ever before, a wholly different tone since 2016,â in the email, Facebook and Twitter criticism of her stories and television appearances. âI sometimes try not to look at Twitter because itâs that negative and horrible,â she told me. âItâs never been like this before.â
On Twitter, Trump attacked the news media in nearly 1,900 tweets, from when he announced his candidacy for president in 2015 until the end of 2019, according to a database maintained by Stephanie Sugars of the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Trumpâs most frequently tweeted phrases to describe the news media and journalists were âfake news,â âenemy of the people,â âdishonest,â and âcorrupt.â
More than 600 of Trumpâs tweets targeted specific news organizations, led by The New York Times, CNN, NBC and MSNBC, Fox News and The Washington Post. He called the Times, among other slurs, âfake,â âphony,â ânasty,â âdisgraced,â âdumb,â âclueless,â âstupid,â âsad,â âfailing,â and âdying.â He characterized the Post as âfake,â âcrazy,â âdishonest,â âphony,â and âdisgraced.â In July 2017, Trump posted on Twitter a 28-second video in which he is portrayed as wrestling and punching a figure whose head has been replaced by the logo for CNN.
Four hundred of Trumpâs tweets referred to more than 100 individual journalists at 30 news organizations. In a September 7, 2019, tweet to his tens of millions of followers, Trump called Parker and Post colleague Philip Rucker âtwo nasty lightweight reportersâ who âshouldnât even be allowed on the grounds of the White House because their reporting is so DISGUSTING & FAKE.â Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron responded that âthe presidentâs statement fits into a pattern of seeking to denigrate and intimidate the press. Itâs unwarranted and dangerous, and it represents a threat to the free press in this country.â
In a November 7, 2019, tweet, Trump called Post reporters Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey, and Carol Leonnig âlowlife reportersâ in a diatribe about a story he did not like. Leonnig said that prompted âa significant uptickâ in hate mail. âSome of the hate mail is a bit vitriolic and describes me as part of the evil Deep State and stupid as a rock,â she told me. âI was tweeted at by people who called me garbage and repeated the presidentâs low-life description.â
At the same time, âIâve also seen an increase in supportive people noting what the president called me and my colleagues – and emailing their support for what we do at the Post and me personally,â Leonnig said. âCommunity members who know my byline suggested we make T-shirts that say, âIâm with lowlife.ââ
That illustrates the deepening chasm in public reaction to Trumpâs attacks on the press. While the cable audience for Fox News has grown, there also have been noticeable increases in digital subscriptions to The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as donations to public radio stations and press freedom groups. âOne of the effects of the way Trump has attacked the press is to remind people about the importance of freedom of the press and our role in holding government accountable,â Dan Balz, the Postâs chief political correspondent, told me.
At the same time, Balz said, âItâs serious when he goes after people, something we have never experienced before.â
âTrump makes a very calculated decision about who he is going to pick on,â said Maryland journalism dean Dalglish, who previously was executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. âHeâs encouraging the public – actually calling on them – to harm journalists. Somebody is going to get hurt.â
There have been threats of murder and mayhem against news organizations. In January 2018, a Michigan man was arrested for telling an operator at CNNâs Atlanta headquarters, âFake news, Iâm coming to gun you down.â In August 2018, a California man, who later told reporters that âAmerica was saved when Donald J. Trump was elected president,â made repeated telephone calls threatening to kill employees of The Boston Globe. In October 2018, a man sent inoperable pipe bombs to CNN in New York, as well as to several Democratic politicians and officials. In February 2019, the FBI arrested a U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant in Maryland who was stockpiling weapons and had a âhit listâ of prominent Democrats and media figures at CNN and MSNBC. In September 2019, a U.S. Army soldier in Kansas was arrested for an online discussion about using explosives to attack CNNâs offices in New York.
âIn all my years of reporting I never once for a moment looked over my shoulder,â Sesno, the former CNN anchor, said. âTrump has mobilized masses to sneer and taunt and do worse to people who are doing their jobs. He frankly acts like a thug, prodding his followers.â

Press access to government information under Trump
Trump has taken personal control over what the White House officially says to and about the press. At his direction, traditional daily White House briefings by the presidentâs press secretary became infrequent in 2018 and ended in 2019 under Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her successor, Grisham. âI told her not to bother,â Trump tweeted about Sanders on January 22, 2019. âThe word gets out anyway! Most will never cover us fairly & hence, the term, Fake News!â
The Wall Street Journalâs Bender said the televised briefings in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room âwere an opportunity to ask questions on a broad range of subjects from throughout the press corps. A window to White House decision-making closed.â
âItâs a sign of this administrationâs contempt for the role of the press that we donât have daily briefings,â said ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl, president of the White House Correspondents Association. âThe briefings are extremely important. Itâs symbolically important to see the spokesperson for the president of the United States answer reportersâ questions every day.â
Beginning in March 2020, the White House briefing room finally came alive again with daily briefings on the COVID-19 crisis by key administration officials led by Trump and Pence. They demonstrated the value of such briefings for the press and the public, even though Trump also has used them to make numerous misleading and self-serving statements and to continue complaining angrily about the press in a presidential election year.
In a March 19 televised briefing, Trump took advantage of a leading question from Chanel Rion, White House correspondent for the far-right One America News, to angrily attack the press. He agreed with Rion that the American press was âsiding with Chinaâ when questioning his characterization of COVID-19 as âthe China virus.â Singling out The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post, Trump denounced their reporting about the administrationâs response to the crisis as âmore than fake news, itâs corrupt news.â He also joked about drastically reducing the number of reporters in the briefing room. âReally, we should probably get rid of about another 75, 80% of you,â Trump told them. âIâll just have two or three that I like in this room.â Trump made the comments days after China expelled at least 13 reporters from the three U.S. newspapers he named.
Until the COVID-19 crisis, Trump mostly made himself available to reporters in informal âspraysâ and âgaggles.â Sprays occurred when a limited number of reporters and photographers were invited into meetings with foreign leaders in the Oval Office or ceremonies elsewhere in the White House or the Rose Garden outside. Gaggles were the rushed encounters with waiting reporters when Trump traversed the South Lawn to or from his Marine One helicopter or when he disembarked from his Air Force One plane.
âHe is probably the most accessible president in the last 20 to 30 years,â Trumpâs former communications director Dubke told me. âHeâs accessible sometimes several times a day – in the Oval Office with foreign leaders, in other White House sprays, around Air Force One, and on his way to Marine One.â
Karl agreed that Trump personally âanswers more questions from reporters that any president Iâve experiencedâ in his years of covering Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. âThatâs a good thing.â
Trump, the former reality television star, appeared to treat these rushed informal encounters with some members of the press as performances for the evening news, rather than real opportunities for reporters to learn much about what is going on in the White House and the administration. The president decided which of the shouted questions he chose to hear and answer, as reporters competed with clicking cameras or the loudly whirling blades of the Marine One Sikorsky helicopter. Trump could ignore follow-up questions or insult a reporter and quickly move on.
âMarine One is loud. Itâs hard to hear him as he walks up and down the row of journalists,â Bender said. âThere is no orderly way to get through the issues of the day.â
Nearly half of the 70 individual press interviews that Trump gave in 2019 were with friendly, right-leaning news organizations, including Fox News, Fox Business News, and The Daily Caller, according to the count kept by Mark Knoller of CBS News. âYou can go months at a time when you see the president do interviews with only one news organization,â ABCâs Karl told me.
White House Press Secretary Grisham did not hold a single press briefing from taking the job in July 2019 until her departure was announced on April 7, while doing only occasional television interviews, mostly on Fox News. In January 2020, 13 former White House press secretaries and other spokespeople from three previous Republican and Democratic administrations signed a public letter calling for the resumption of regular press briefings. âCredible men and women, standing in front of those iconic backgrounds at the White House, State Department, and Pentagon,â their letter stated, âare essential to the work the United States must do in the world.â
In response, Grisham told the Washington Examiner that journalists had used White House press briefings primarily as opportunities for journalists to âgrandstandâ on television, and that she was available to individual reporters throughout each day. âIn a press briefing, I would call on one reporter from one outlet and they would maybe get one follow-up question. During my day, I talk to five, six, seven reporters from every single outlet,â she told the paper. âI talk to – I wouldnât say hundreds – but nearly a hundred reporters a day.â
âShe doesnât talk to a hundred reporters a day,â Karl told me, âand not a lot of information flows out of the press office, compared to other administrations.â
Politicoâs Kumar said she missed the opportunity to buttonhole White House officials who attended daily briefings after the cameras were off. Reporters had to take turns participating in Oval Office sprays, and Kumar said she was able to get in only about once a month. Aides in the press office are always accessible, she said, but they often âdonât have information or donât want to provide information.â
At the State Department, and at the Pentagon until recently, press briefings were infrequent, with none for periods of many months. Both cut down on the number of journalists who could travel with the State and Defense secretaries on trips abroad, even though news organizations pay all the expenses. Occasionally, each department revoked travel for reporters who wrote stories that officials did not like.
âThere has been a marked deterioration in the State Departmentâs relationship with the press under this administration,â said AFP State Department correspondent Shaun Tandon, president of the State Department Correspondentsâ Association. âOn camera daily briefings have fallen by the wayside,â he said, depriving reporters of the opportunity âto ask questions and get answers on many issuesâ each day.
On-the-record daily briefings were replaced by occasional visits by State officials to the departmentâs press area for specific subject briefings, which are not on the record âninety per cent of the time,â Washington Post State correspondent Carol Morello told me. That leaves the reportersâ stories open to criticism that they are based only on an anonymous âsenior State Department official.â
When he talked to reporters, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was openly hostile when he disliked their questions. On separate occasions, he told a Nashville television reporter and PBS News Hour anchor Judy Woodruff, when they pressed him in interviews about the dealings with Ukraine that eventually led to Trumpâs impeachment in the House of Representatives, that it sounded as though they were working for the Democratic National Committee.
On January 24, 2020, Mary Louise Kelly, co-host of NPRâs âAll Things Consideredâ program and a veteran national security reporter, interviewed Pompeo on the record about Trump administration policies for Iran and Ukraine. She had a written agreement with his staff to ask about a range of subjects. Pompeo objected when Kelly asked if he owed the former American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, an apology for not speaking up for her when Trump recalled her to Washington after a long smear campaign against her.
Afterward, an aide asked Kelly to come to Pompeoâs private room, where he angrily upbraided her for asking about Ukraine. Kelly later recounted on NPR that Pompeo asked, ââDo you think Americans care about Ukraine?â He used the F-word in that sentence and many others. He asked if I could find Ukraine on a map; I said yes. He called out for his aides to bring him a map of the world with no writing, no countries marked. I pointed to Ukraine.â Kelly had not been asked, nor agreed, for that exchange to be off the record.
When his blow-up became a widely reported story, Pompeo issued a formal statement falsely accusing Kelly of lying to him about the ground rules for the interview and their conversation afterwards. âIt is shameful that this reporter chose to violate the basic rules of journalism and decency,â he stated. âThis is another example of how unhinged the media has become in its quest to hurt President Trump and this Administration. It is no wonder that the American people distrust many in the media when they so consistently demonstrate their agenda and their absence of integrity.â
NPR CEO John Lansing responded by telling host Michel Martin in an âAll Things Consideredâ interview that Pompeoâs treatment of Kelly was âoutrageous and inappropriateâ and that âthe statement from the secretary is blatantly false.â Lansing added, âIt is not unusual for there to be tension between government officials and journalists because journalists are – as I said, their duty is to ask difficult questions⌠But this goes well beyond tension. This goes towards intimidation. And let me just say this. We will not be intimidated.â
The State Department punished NPR by not allowing its longtime State Department reporter, Michele Kelemen, to travel on Pompeoâs government plane for his subsequent trip to Ukraine. Trump later praised a smiling Pompeo before a friendly audience at a White House event for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. âVery impressive, Mike,â Trump said, smiling himself, as people in the audience laughed. âThat reporter couldnât have done too good a job on you yesterday. I think you did a good job on her, actually.â
State Department Spokesperson Morgan Ortagus did not respond to a request for an interview for this report.
At the Pentagon, under Trumpâs first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, âaccess deteriorated pretty quickly because of reportersâ questions about things in which there was a gap between him and the president,â Washington Post Pentagon reporter Dan Lamothe told me. âMattis was less likely to talk, and the generals were less likely to talk.â During Mattisâ last months, âpeople were reassigned within the Pentagon for speaking too candidly to the press,â he said.
Access increased somewhat under the current defense secretary, Mark Esper, although there was still less engagement with the press than before the Trump administration, said Lamothe, who has covered the Pentagon for 12 years.
Defense Department Press Secretary Alyssa Farah told me that Esper âregularly interacts with the press and pushes for access.â In addition to Esperâs monthly press conferences, she said, Jonathan Hoffman, assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs, now holds weekly on camera briefings. One of Farahâs aides, Navy Capt. Brook DeWalt, said the number of press officers has been increased, and credentialed reporters can roam anywhere in the Pentagon.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been particularly combative about its news coverage. During the tenures of its two administrators under Trump, first Scott Pruitt and then Andrew Wheeler, the EPA repeatedly attacked reporters and news organizations – from The Associated Press to The New York Times to the conservative Washington Examiner – over stories the agency considered unfavorable. It barred some reporters from EPA events and its master mailing list.
âIâm trying not to get into name calling or picking fights,â Corry Schiermeyer, EPAâs associate administrator for public affairs, told Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi in July 2019. âI honestly just want to ensure that when anyone reports about our policies and issues that the reporting is correct and accurate.â
On January 14, 2020, EPA issued a press release castigating The New York Times for publishing a detailed examination of the backgrounds of senior EPA officials. âUnder the Trump administration, the people appointed to those positions overwhelmingly used to work in the fossil fuel, chemical, and agriculture industries,â the Times story stated. âDuring their time in government they have been responsible for loosening or undoing nearly 100 environmental protections from pollution and pesticides, as well as weakening preservations of natural resources and efforts to curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.â
âNew York Times Continues Campaign Against Trump Administration. All the News That Fits the Agenda to Print,â the EPAâs press release was headlined. âToday, the New York Times continued its march to irrelevance through extreme bias,â it began, âlaunching an interactive hit list on the Trump administration and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.â
At the Interior Department, Trump appointees âhave made pretty clear that climate change is not an area for polite discussion,â said Bobby Magill, who covers Interior for Bloomberg Environment. âThey ignore requests for comment on any subject concerning climate change.â
EPA and Interior are among the federal departments and agencies whose websites were scrubbed of information and resources about such subjects as climate change, corporate taxation, the Affordable Care Act, domestic violence, womenâs health, and LGBTQ issues, as monitored by the Sunlight Foundation and other open government groups. Less information is available online about officialsâ schedules and visitors to the White House and cabinet departments, according to the open government groupsâ research. The House Committee on Oversight and Reform reported in 2018 that âmany agencies have refused to disclose the identities of individuals serving on Regulatory Reform Task Forces that President Trump required each agency to create.â
What were already long delays in responding to Freedom of Information Act requests have grown at most federal departments and agencies during the Trump administration, the Associated Press found. The administration spent more than $40 million in its first year defending its decisions to withhold requested documents from news organizations, journalists, open government groups, and the general public, the AP reported. The Departments of Homeland Security, Interior, and Justice were sued most often, according to an analysis by The FOIA Project.
âInterior doesnât respond much to FOIA requests,â said Magill, the immediate past president of the Society of Environmental Journalists. âA lot of us are waiting months and months for FOIA requests to come back.â
Carol Danko, senior adviser in Interiorâs office of communications, did not answer a request for a response.

Trump and the truth
As he centralized his administrationâs information control in himself, Trump announced most of his presidential decisions, administration appointments, and departures – and revealed much of what is on his mind – in his many tweets each day. âHe uses Twitter to set and announce policy,â Rucker of the Post told me. âIt gives us the clearest sense of his mood, whatâs on his mind.â
The presidentâs tweets âgo around the press and directly engage his most ardent supporters,â said Bender of The Wall Street Journal. âTrumpâs tweets are a remarkable window into him and his private moments, something never seen before by a president in my lifetime.â
âThe power of the presidentâs tweets is unprecedented,â former White House communications director Dubke told me. âThe press does not know how to handle them. They are reported as âbreaking news.â They are much more effective than a press release. Outside the press, people are not actually reading them. Theyâre getting them from the media. The press almost immediately puts them out without a filter, and then it spends the next few hours interpreting them.â
However, Twitter allowed Trump âto state untruths with impunity,â as Columbia Journalism Review digital media reporter Matthew Ingram wrote, âknowing that his tweets will be widely redistributed by his followers and the media, and to dodge follow-up questions or criticism.â
In doing so, Trump made more false statements than any president in memory. On his first day in office on January 21, 2017, he insisted that a record number of people had attended his inauguration. His claim was quickly refuted by comparisons of photographs of the crowds on Washingtonâs Mall for his and Barack Obamaâs inaugurations. Nevertheless, Trumpâs then-press secretary, Sean Spicer, used his initial news briefing to angrily accuse reporters of âdeliberately false reportingâ of the inauguration crowd size. On NBCâs âMeet the Pressâ program the next day, presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway was asked by moderator Chuck Todd why Spicer would âutter a provable falsehood.â She said Spicer was providing âalternative facts,â to which Todd responded, âLook, alternative facts are not facts. Theyâre falsehoods.â
In the first three years of his presidency, Trump made more than 16,200 false or misleading claims on Twitter, at his rallies and other public appearances, and in encounters with reporters, according to The Washington Postâs Fact Checker, run by Glenn Kessler. They included what he said about the economy, taxes, trade and tariffs, foreign leaders, immigration and immigrants, his political opponents, the environment and climate change, health care, guns, voter fraud, Barack Obamaâs presidency, and the impeachment investigation of Trump, among other subjects. Several other fact-checking sites also have found a multitude of Trumpâs statements to be false or misleading.
âA defining feature of the Donald Trump presidency is the bombardment of lies – Trumpâs unceasing campaign to convince people of things that arenât true,â CNNâs fact-checking reporter Daniel Dale wrote on its Facts First site at the end of 2019. Some of Trumpâs 2019 false statements âwere innocent slips, some of them were little exaggerations,â according to Dale. âBut a large number of them were whoppers: deliberate, significant attempts to deceive and manipulate.â
New York Times fact-checker Linda Qiu wrote that Trump uttered at least 18 falsehoods, exaggerations and debunked conspiracy theories in a single 53-minute telephone interview during the November 22, 2019 Fox News morning program âFox & Friends.â Topics included the impeachment investigation, tax cuts, tariffs, congressional legislation, and a false claim that Trump âopenedâ an Apple computer factory he visited, which had been operating since 2013.
âI think he often does not know that what he says is incorrect,â Bob Schieffer of CBS News told me. âItâs what he has seen and heard on TV. He may make more errors because he doesnât know what heâs talking about rather than trying to mislead.â
Some analysts have matched false statements Trump has made with what was said about the same subject at about the same time on Fox News shows that he watches. He also has retweeted false statements that he has found on Twitter, including some from right-wing conspiracy groups.
âNo other president has said as many false things as Trump,â ProPublicaâs Steiger said, creating âa readiness of people to disbelieve factual reporting.â
The Postâs Kessler and The Timesâ Qiu documented numerous false statements that Trump made during the COVID-19 crisis. âItâs one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. Itâs going to be just fine,â the president said in a CNBC interview on January 21. âWeâre very close to a vaccine,â he said at a news conference on February 25, when vaccine research was just beginning. âAnybody that wants a test can get a test,â Trump told reporters on March 6, when there were widespread shortages of tests for the virus. On March 11, he said that health insurance industry leaders had told him they would waive all co-payments for treatment of the virus, when they agreed only to waive co-payment for tests.
âAmericans donât have much of a shared reality these days, and Trump has made it worse,â Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan told me. âHis falsehoods have become commonplace. There is no expectation of truth and reality at the highest levels.â
When I asked her about news media fact-checking of Trump, Sullivan said, âI donât know that it makes a difference. It doesnât seem to make much of a dent among citizens who are Trump supporters. They see it as part of the media elite.â

Trump, the law, and the press
In May 2018, Trump suggested in a tweet that news organizations reporting negatively about him should lose their White House press credentials. âThe Fake News is working overtime. Just reported that, despite the tremendous success we are having with the economy & all things else, 91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake). Why do we work so hard in working with the media when it is corrupt? Take away credentials?â
That is what happened on November 7, 2018, the day after the mid-term elections in which the Democrats won control of the House of Representatives. The White House revoked the credential, known as a âhard pass,â of CNNâs Jim Acosta after he and Trump argued at a press conference over whether Acosta could ask a follow-up question. Trump called him âa rude, terrible person,â while a White House intern tried to take the microphone away from Acosta.
After CNN filed a lawsuit in federal court on November 13, U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly ordered the White House on November 16 to return Acostaâs hard pass immediately. Kelly ruled that the White House had violated Acostaâs constitutional rights by not allowing him access to the White House grounds to cover news and appear on television from there. A 1977 federal appellate court decision had established that, under the First Amendment, the denial of a White House press pass could not be arbitrary. Acosta was given back his hard pass.
At the same time, the White House instituted a new rule that would take away hard passes from journalists who do not go there at least 50% of the time. It made exemptions for the many âsenior journalistsâ who are âconsistently engaged in covering the White Houseâ without necessarily being there. This could have given the Trump White House control over who had passes, pending further court challenges. However, no issues had arisen as of March 2020, according to the White House Correspondents Association. With the disappearance of daily White House briefings, many reporters were contacting their White House sources by phone anyway.

Trump also has often called for changes in American libel law, presumably so that he could successfully sue journalists and news organizations who publish unflattering stories and books about him. On March 30, 2017, he tweeted: âThe failing @nytimes has disgraced the media world. Gotten me wrong for two solid years. Change libel laws?â On January 10, 2018, he said during a cabinet meeting that he wanted to take âa strong lookâ at changing libel laws âso that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts.â
On September 2018, Trump tweeted repeatedly about Bob Woodwardâs book about the Trump White House, âFear,â saying in one tweet, âIsnât it a shame that someone can write an article or book, totally make up stories and form a picture of a person that is literally the opposite of the fact, and get away with it without retribution or cost. Donât know why Washington politicians donât change libel laws?â
Those politicians and Trump can do little to change American libel law, beyond the potential long-term impact of the presidentâs federal judicial appointments. Most libel cases are decided under state laws in accordance with the landmark 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. The high court ruled unanimously that public figures and officials must prove âactual maliceâ – a statement made with âknowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or notâ – to win a libel claim. Congress is limited by what it could do under the First Amendment prohibition against any law that abridges âthe freedom of speech, or of the press.â
Nevertheless, Trumpâs re-election campaign filed separate libel suits during 10 days in early 2020 about opinion pieces published in 2019 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. The Trump campaign sued The Times on February 26 in Manhattan Supreme Court over a March 27, 2019 opinion column by former Times editor Max Frankel speculating about Trumpâs 2016 campaign and Russia. It sued The Washington Post on March 3 in federal court in Washington over opinion pieces in June 2019 by columnists Greg Sargent, about the same subject, and Paul Waldman, speculating about the 2020 Trump campaign and Russia and North Korea. And the Trump campaign sued CNN on March 6 in federal court in Atlanta, CNNâs headquarters, over a June 13, 2019, opinion piece by contributor Larry Noble speculating about the 2020 Trump campaign and Russia.
Contending that the columns were âfalse and defamatoryâ and that The Times, The Post, and CNN were biased against the Trump campaign, the lawsuits demanded unspecified âmillions of dollarsâ in damages from the three news organizations. They all said they would vigorously defend themselves.
The libel suits âhave very little legal merit,â New York Times deputy legal counsel David McCraw told me, because they are challenging legally protected opinions about the administration. âI think they hoped to make headlinesâ rather than prevail in court, he said.
University of Georgia media law professor Jonathan Peters agreed that the lawsuits are âbaselessâ under legal precedents. But they are âwholly consistent with Trumpâs efforts to undermine the press,â he added. âIâm worried that it may chill speech about newsworthy public issues.â
âFiling these lawsuits is a different kind of test of the system, entangling federal judgesâ in Trumpâs battles with the press, Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told me. âIâm confident that they will be dismissed in a demonstration of judicial independence.â

Targeting news media owners
Defending against such lawsuits may or may not prove to be a costly irritant for news organizations. But Trump also has threatened some of their ownersâ financial independence.
In May 2018 he urged the U.S. Postal Service to double the rate it charges Amazon and other firms to ship packages. Amazonâs founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post through a private company separate from Amazon. Bezos has declined any role in its news coverage. Nevertheless, Trump has frequently referred derisively to âthe Amazon Washington Post.â A task force created by Trump later found that package delivery for Amazon and other e-retailers was profitable for the Postal Service.
In July 2019, Trump told reporters at the White House that he was looking into a $10 billion, 10-year Defense Department cloud computing contract competition between Amazon and Microsoft. After the contract was awarded to Microsoft, Amazon filed a formal protest in November 2019 in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Amazon contended that Trumpâs ârepeated public and behind-the-scenes attacksâ against Amazon and his desire to âscrew Amazonâ prompted the Pentagon to choose the Microsoft proposal despite its âclear failures.â The complaint cited news reports that Trump had directed Defense Secretary Esper to intervene after it appeared that the contract would go to Amazon. A Pentagon spokeswoman responded that âthere were no external influences on the source selection decision.â On February 13, 2020, Court of Claims Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith ordered all work on the cloud computing contract to stop until Amazonâs legal challenge is resolved.
In October 2017 tweets expressing his anger over NBC and CNN reporting about him, Trump called for challenges to the âlicensesâ of âNBC and the Networks.â In one of the tweets, he said, âNetwork news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked.â
The Federal Communications Commission, an independent federal agency, licenses individual broadcast stations, not networks. NBC Universal is owned by Comcast, which also owns broadcast stations in several large U.S. cities. In response to questions at the time, FCC chairman Ajit Pai said his agency does not have the authority to revoke the license of a broadcast station based on program content. âI believe in the First Amendment,â Pai said. âThe FCC, under my leadership, will stand for the First Amendment.â
Trump has periodically put public pressure on the AT&T corporation to influence coverage of him by CNN, which it acquired in a merger with Time Warner in 2017. In a 2016 press release, the Trump campaign noted that AT&T âis now trying to buy Time Warner and thus the wildly anti-Trump CNN. Donald Trump would never approve such a deal.â After Trump became president, the Justice Department challenged the merger, seeking to force any resulting new company to sell CNNâs parent, Turner Broadcasting, as a condition for approval of the deal. When Justice subsequently lost two federal court challenges, the merger took full effect early in 2019.
The President then called on Americans in June 3, 2019 tweets to boycott AT&T to force change at CNN. âI believe that if people stopped using or subscribing to @ATT, they would be forced to make big changes at @CNN, which is dying in the ratings anyway,â his tweet said. âIt is so unfair with such bad, Fake News! Why wouldnât they act. When the World watches @CNN, it gets a false picture of USA. Sad!â
The Trump re-election campaign even threatened legal action against CNN in October 2019 for âmisrepresentingâ itself as a news organization because of comments some of its employees made about politics in conversations secretly recorded by an undercover conservative activist.
Trump also suggested a boycott of Fox News in August 2019, after he objected to some unfavorable reports and comments by the few Fox personalities who were not unwaveringly supportive of him. He began a flurry of tweets by saying, âThe New @FoxNews is letting millions of GREAT people down! We have to start looking for a new News Outlet. Fox isnât working for us anymore.â
The president had used tweets to call for the firings of news executives at NBC in November 2017 and at CNN in August 2018. In October 2019, Trump instructed his staff to cancel White House subscriptions to The New York Times and The Washington Post.
After Secretary of State Pompeoâs conflict with NPR in January 2020, conservative radio commentator Mark Levin called the public radio network a âDemocratic Party propaganda operationâ and asked on Twitter, âWhy does NPR still exist?â Trump retweeted it, adding, âA very good question.â In his annual federal budget request, released in mid-February 2020, Trump proposed cutting to zero by 2023 the funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes taxpayersâ money to NPR and the rest of public broadcasting.

War on leaks
From the beginning of his presidency, Trump also sought to crack down on how much information the press was able to glean about his administration from confidential sources inside the government and even the White House. The surprising flow of leaks included drafts of controversial executive orders, proposed policy changes, White House strategy discussions, contacts between some of his advisers and Russia, and even some of Trumpâs telephone calls with foreign leaders. The leaks appeared to result from White House staff rivalries and concerns in federal departments and agencies about Trumpâs agenda and consolidation of decision-making in the Oval Office.
âA weird thing is going on. The Obama administration was so disciplined. But in the Trump administration, theyâre leaking from the top,â the University of Marylandâs Dalglish told me. âTheyâre trying to find ways to get information out. Reporters have told me that you can find people in the White House to talk.â
âTraditional access to the White House and the departments is more limited,â said Washington Post editor Baron. âBut there is a lot of access to individual people because of rivalries, lack of direction, and disagreements over policy. Everyone is trying to undermine each other.â
âPeople in the White House are relatively quick to return calls, even when they hate The New York Times and the press,â Times media reporter Jeremy Peters told me. âThere is less loyalty, more leaking.â
Within the rest of the government, âthe drive to get information out to the public remains very strong,â said Scott Shane, a longtime national security reporter in Washington for The New York Times. âThere is motivation to get their perspective on developments out. There has been escalation on both sides – a crackdown on leaks and motivation to get things out that has been a good bit stronger.â
Trump began tweeting about âlow-life leakersâ as early as February 2017. He vowed, âThey will be caught!â Then, in a private meeting on February 14, Trump suggested to then-FBI Director James Comey that he should jail journalists who publish classified information damaging to his administration, according to a May 17 New York Times account citing one of Comeyâs associates.
At a February 16 press conference, Trump said, âIâve actually called the Justice Department to look into the leaks. Those are criminal leaks.â
In July 2017, Trump complained in a tweet that then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions was âvery weakâ on leak investigations. Sessions responded by announcing that the Justice Department had tripled the number of investigations into leaks of classified information than were active at the end of the Obama administration, which itself had significantly increased criminal investigations and prosecutions of such leaks.
Sessions did not say how many of those new investigations involved leaks to reporters. At that point, only one such case had been prosecuted by his Justice Department. A National Security Agency contractor, Reality Winner, was charged in June 2017 with sending a classified intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 election to a news website later identified as The Intercept. More prosecutions would come.
At a congressional hearing in October 2017, Sessions said, âWe have 27 investigations open today,â again without specifying how many involved leaks to the press. âWe intend to get the bottom of these leaks.â
On September 8, 2017, then-White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster issued a memo ordering âevery federal department and agencyâ to hold training sessions for employees âon the importance of protecting classified and controlled unclassified information.â Within days, a copy of the memo was leaked to BuzzFeed News, which published it in its entirety.
During Barack Obamaâs administration, 10 government employees and contractors were prosecuted for leaking classified information, including eight charged under the 1917 Espionage Act. The law was enacted to combat spying for foreign countries and interference with and insubordination in the American military in World War I. Between then and the Obama administration, there were only three prosecutions under that law in 90 years.
By the end of 2019, the Trump administration had indicted eight government employees and contractors in three years for leaking classified information to journalists. The administration also charged Julian Assange, the leader of WikiLeaks, with obtaining secret military and diplomatic documents and publishing them on the WikiLeaks website in 2010, making them accessible to news organizations in the U.S. and around the world. Six of the nine people prosecuted were indicted for violating the Espionage Act.
Reality Winner, then a 25-year-old Air Force veteran, was the first to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act by the Trump administration. She was working as a contractor for the National Security Agency when she was arrested and charged in June 2017 for leaking an NSA top secret intelligence report about Russian election interference that was published in part by The Intercept. She pleaded guilty in June 2018 and was sentenced to more than five years in prison, minus the year she spent in jail awaiting trial.
The Intercept also was identified by Minnesota Public Radio as the recipient of classified documents leaked in 2016 and 2017 by former FBI agent Terry Albury about the bureauâs rules for recruiting informants and identifying potential extremists in the Somali-American community in Minneapolis. Albury, who is African-American, believed that the FBI practices were discriminatory and racist, according to his lawyer. Albury was arrested in March 2018 and the next month pleaded guilty to two felony violations of the Espionage Act. He was sentenced to four years in prison.
In June 2018, James Wolfe, retired security director for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was indicted for lying to the FBI about his contacts and relationships with reporters. The indictment stated that Wolfe specifically denied knowing national security reporter Ali Watkins, who was working at The New York Times when Wolfe was charged. Wolfe and Watkins had a romantic relationship for more than three years while she was covering his committee, before she was hired by the Times in December 2017. While dating Wolfe, Watkins worked for, in order, HuffPost, BuzzFeed News, and Politico. She informed each of them of the relationship but said that he was not a source for her stories.
The FBI opened its investigation after an April 3, 2017, Watkins story in BuzzFeed News revealed a 2013 contact between a Russian spy and Carter Page, who later became an adviser in Trumpâs presidential campaign. When the FBI interviewed Wolfe in December 2017, he denied that he had been in contact with any reporters. When they later showed him a photo of himself with Watkins, he said that they had been in a personal relationship but that he had never given her any confidential government information.
On February 13, 2018, the Justice Department notified Watkins by letter that it had seized under subpoena some of her telephone and email records for several years through December 2017. On her lawyerâs advice, she did not tell the Times about the subpoena and seizure until after Wolfe was indicted. The Justice Department did not notify Watkins or the Times in advance about the subpoena, which would have given them an opportunity to contest it in court.
The indictment stated that Watkins and Wolfe communicated frequently around the time of the Carter Page story. It also quoted a December 2017 text message in which Wolfe told Watkins, âI always tried to give you as much information that I could and to do the right thing with it so you could get that scoop before anyone else.â Wolfe pleaded guilty on October 15, 2018, to a single count of lying to federal investigators about his contacts with reporters. He was sentenced to two months in prison and fined $7,500. He was never charged with having disclosed classified information, which he denied doing.
The Times announced on July 3, 2018, that Watkins was being moved from its Washington bureau to New York to cover local crime and law enforcement. Executive Editor Dean Baquet wrote in a memo to the Times staff that the paper was âtroubledâ by her conduct. âFor a reporter to have an intimate relationship with someone he or she covers is unacceptable,â he wrote.
Baquet also stated that âwe abhor the actions of the government in this case. Without notice, investigators rummaged through years of a journalistâs phone and email records, an intrusion that puts First Amendment protections at risk and violated Justice Department guidelines that have bipartisan support. An undercover border agent, who appears to have illicitly accessed her travel records, also tried to pressure her into spying on other reporters and their sources.â
He was referring to a bizarre incident in which a Customs and Border Protection agent, Jeffrey Rambo, emailed Watkins in June 2017 to arrange a meeting in a Washington bar, at which he questioned her about her sources. Rambo said he knew about her recent vacation with Wolfe to Spain, and he threatened to expose their relationship if she did not help identify government officials who were leaking to the press. The Times later reported that the government was investigating the actions of Rambo, who had been temporarily assigned to its National Targeting Center outside Washington, where the travel data for Americans and visiting foreign citizens is stored.
The Committee to Protect Journalists and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit on August 8, 2019 to force CBP to release documents including Ramboâs non-governmental emails with Watkins, any communications to CBP containing the phrases âleaksâ or âunauthorized disclosures,â and policies âdescribing the role of CBP in investigating disclosures of government information to the news media.â
Joshua Schulte, a former CIA software engineer, was indicted under the Espionage Act on June 18, 2018, for sending WikiLeaks classified documents that detailed tools and techniques used by the CIA to hack into smartphones, web browsers, smart televisions, and automobiles. After WikiLeaks began publishing the documents in March 2017, federal agents raided Schulteâs New York apartment and allegedly found on his computer a trove of child pornography. Schulte was first charged with possession of child pornography and later indicted on a total of 15 charges dealing with possession and distribution of classified information. On March 9, 2020, Schulte was found guilty on two counts of making false statements to investigators and contempt of court by a federal jury in New York that deadlocked on the rest of the counts. The government was expected to try him again on the remaining counts. The possession of child pornography case was still pending.
From October 2017 through October 2018, BuzzFeed News published stories about suspicious banking transactions made by Russian diplomats and Trump associates, including his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort. On October 16, 2018, Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, a senior adviser on financial crimes at the Treasury Department, was arrested and charged with giving a BuzzFeed News reporter confidential reports about suspicious transactions. The criminal complaint showed that the FBI used search warrants to gain access to Edwardsâs personal email account and cell phone records for email, phone call, and text message activity between her and BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold. Edwards pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy on January 13, 2020. Sentencing was set for June 9, 2020.
A similar case began when IRS investigative analyst John C. Fry was charged on February 21, 2019 with âunlawful disclosureâ in May 2018 of government reports about suspicious overseas financial transactions by former Trump attorney Michael Cohen. Lawyer Michael Avenatti posted the information online and gave it to a reporter for The New Yorker, who was not publicly identified. The Washington Post published an article about money flowing in and out of the account of a company Cohen used to arrange hush money payments to Avenatti client Stephanie Clifford, the adult film star known as Stormy Daniels who said she had an affair with Trump. Fry pleaded guilty on August 14, 2019, to one count of illegally disclosing confidential IRS information to Avenatti. Fry was sentenced to five yearsâ probation and a $5,000 fine. (Meanwhile, in unconnected cases, Avenatti was charged and convicted in New York with trying to extort more than $20 million from the sports apparel company Nike, and he has pleaded not guilty in California to tax and fraud charges.)

Daniel Hale, a former National Security Agency employee and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency contractor, was indicted under the Espionage Act on May 9, 2019, for giving 36 documents about American drone warfare, 15 of which were classified, to a reporter between February and August 2014. The documents were used in Intercept stories and a book about drone strikes against terrorist targets around the world. In autumn 2019, defense attorneys argued in court motions that Hale was a whistleblower, not a spy, and that his prosecution would chill newsgathering. Prosecutors argued that Hale had signed agreements waiving his right to disclose national security information while working for the government. No trial had been set as of late March.
âLeaks of classified information cause damage to national security,â John Demers, head of the Justice Departmentâs national security division, said in an October 9, 2019, statement announcing the Espionage Act indictment of Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst Henry Kyle Frese for sharing classified information with two journalists. Court papers identified one of the reporters as his girlfriend, Amanda Macias, a national security reporter at CNBC. From May to July 2018, her byline appeared on CNBC stories about Chinaâs development, testing, and deployment of new weapons systems, attributed to âsources with direct knowledge of U.S. intelligence reports.â The indictment stated that the information came from classified DIA intelligence reports accessed by Frese. The FBI said it intercepted some of Freseâs phone calls, text messages, and Twitter data. Prosecutors declined to say whether they had accessed the reportersâ data. Frese pleaded guilty on February 20, 2020, to the willful transmission of classified information to two journalists. Sentencing was scheduled for June 18, 2020.
âThe trend of prosecutions matters more than individual facts in some of the cases,â such as reportersâ romantic relationships with sources, said Gabe Rottman, technology and press freedom project director at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The prosecutions âare trying to dissuade sources from coming forward and providing information to journalists.â
The large number of prosecutions of news sources by Trumpâs Justice Department âis the fault of the Obama administration,â Post media columnist Sullivan told me. âIt created a blueprint that has been easy to follow. The use of the Espionage Act for this kind of thing is terrible.â
The multi-faceted crackdowns on leaks by both the Obama and Trump administrations has frightened news sources. âA lot of sources are more careful now,â Shane, the Times national security reporter, said. âTrump administration employees have discovered the virtue of things like Signal,â a message encryption tool. âThereâs been a learning curve.â
âEverybodyâs more careful,â Washington Post editor Baron said. âReporters are using encrypted communications and meeting people in person.â
Kumar, of Politico, lists on her emails a cell phone number that can be reached through Signal or WhatsApp encryption. âEverybody wants to talk in a different way,â she told me. âThey are more worried about using emails and phone calls. They want to use Signal or WhatsApp. Not just people in the administration, but also close to it and outside it.â
No reporters have been prosecuted. But the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has many press freedom advocates concerned that it crosses that line. On May 23, 2019, Assange was indicted on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act by conspiring with former U.S. Army Private Chelsea Manning in 2010 to obtain and disseminate a vast digital trove of classified government documents. The Justice Department is seeking to extradite Assange from the U.K., where he was arrested after Ecuador ended his years of asylum in its London embassy. His lawyer in the U.K., Jennifer Robinson, has said that Assange did not commit a crime by publishing truthful information.
Assange obtained from Manning and published on WikiLeaks raw military and diplomatic documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. News organizations then published many stories about the documentsâ content, after doing research to avoid publication of information that could cause harm to individuals named in them. Manning was convicted at court-martial and served seven years of a 35-year sentence before it was commuted by President Obama. His administration also opened a grand jury investigation of Assange but never indicted him, in part because of concerns that it could criminalize reporting techniques used by journalists at mainstream news organizations.
The case was left open for the Trump administration. It decided to indict Assange after what The Washington Post later described as a long debate within the Justice Department over its potential First Amendment impact. The indictment alleges that Assange conspired with Manning to âfacilitate Manningâs acquisition and transmission of classified information related to the national defense of the United States so that WikiLeaks could publicly disseminate the information on its website.â
Press freedom groups reacted with concern. Rottman of the Reporters Committee said, âAlthough the government stated that the defendant, Julian Assange, âis no journalist,â the legal theory prosecutors are using would punish activities such as solicitation, receipt, and publication of classified information.â
âItâs not criminal to encourage someone to leak classified information to you as a journalist. Thatâs called news gathering, and there are First Amendment protections for news gathering,â prominent media lawyer Theodore J. Boutrous Jr. told The New York Times. âThe ramifications of this are so potentially dangerous and serious for the ability of journalists to gather and disseminate information that the American people have a right to know.â
Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told me, âThe wholly unprecedented action that the Justice Department has taken against Julian Assange is definitely my biggest worry. He is the first non-government person to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. It has the potential to outlaw many kinds of reporting of national security information.â
As CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon wrote in The Washington Post in May, 2019, the prosecution of Assange is âa direct threat to journalists everywhere in the worldâ because Assange, an Australian, is not an American citizen and the actions for which he is being charged all occurred outside the U.S. âAnyone anywhere in the world who publishes information that the U.S. government deems to be classified could be prosecuted for espionage,â Simon wrote. He argued that this could be a threat to journalists in Colombia âwho have reported on the presence of U.S. forces in their country,â those in Pakistan âwho have reported on ties between the U.S. government and the countryâs shadowy intelligence service,â and those in France âwho have reported on U.S. counter-terrorism operations in North Africa.â
Assange faces an additional charge under the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which, as CPJ senior correspondent for global technology Avi Asher-Schapiro has written, raises concerns that the law could be used to implicate journalists in the criminal activities of their sources.
Overall, ProPublicaâs Paul Steiger told me, âthe trend toward prosecutions of the press, the violations of our rights to privacy, the digging into phone records and documents are way worse than anything Iâve seen before. The Trump administration is threatening our ability to report.â

Harassment of journalists at U. S. borders
Just as troubling for news reporting is the unprecedented harassment of journalists during the Trump administration by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at entry points into the country. Since 2017, more than a dozen reporters and photographers have said they were stopped, questioned, and searched by CBP officers at airports and border crossings. In some cases, they were detained for several hours. Along the border with Mexico, some journalists appear to have been targeted because their identities, photographs, and movements were in a secret database maintained by the CBP, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
In November 2017, then-NBC News journalist Alastair Jamieson of Britain was detained for an hour when he arrived at the Miami airport from London. A CBP agent questioned Jamieson about his travels in the Middle East and repeatedly accused him of being part of the âfake newsâ media. In June 2018, Washington Post senior editor Ann Gerhart and her husband, New York Times Magazine writer Michael Sokolove, were questioned about their profession and politics when they arrived at the Newark airport from a Caribbean vacation. The CBP agent demanded to know their opinion of Trump and told the two American journalists that the press had been too critical of him and should âfall in line.â
David Mack, an Australian journalist who works at BuzzFeed News in the U.S., was stopped and aggressively questioned about the websiteâs reporting when he landed at New Yorkâs JFK airport from London in early February 2019. The CBP agent focused on BuzzFeedâs coverage of special counsel Robert Muellerâs investigation of Trumpâs 2016 election campaign, and he erroneously insisted to Mack that Mueller had called BuzzFeed âfake newsâ in a press conference. After BuzzFeed complained to the CBP, its assistant commissioner for public affairs, Andrew Meehan, apologized to Mack in a statement and said it was investigating the incident. Mackâs treatment âdoes not reflect the agency, and certainly not the professionalism that its officers strive to maintain,â Meehan said.
However, harassment of journalists at U.S. entry points continued. American freelance journalist Manuel Rapalo, who reported for Al-Jazeera on migrants traveling toward the U.S. in Mexico, was stopped and questioned later in February, for the third time, as he was returning home. After scanning his passport at the Miami airport, a CBP agent questioned Rapalo for more than an hour about his work, searched his notebooks, and asked why they included information about filing Freedom of Information Act requests.
When American Rolling Stone journalist Seth Harp arrived at the Austin airport from Mexico City in May 2019, he was detained and aggressively questioned by CBP agents for four hours about his work, his conversations with editors and colleagues, and his political views. In an account of his experience on The Intercept website, Harp wrote that the CBP agents read his notes and searched his cell phone and laptop computer, recording the laptopâs serial number and the phoneâs settings.
Independent American photographer Tim Stegmaier was detained by CBP agents for more than four hours when he arrived in Detroit in June 2019 from Shanghai after a working trip in the Philippines. The agents confiscated his computer, camera, and phone after finding images of unclothed Filipino children playing in filthy water and industrial waste. Three months later, in response to written protests from media and civil liberties organizations, the CBP said in a letter that Stegmaier had done nothing illegal, and his equipment was returned.
Ben Watson, a U.S. Army veteran and news editor at Defense One, an Atlantic Media publication that covers the defense industry, was stopped and questioned when he arrived from Denmark at Washingtonâs Dulles International Airport in October 2019. When Watson replied âjournalismâ to a routine question about his occupation, the CBP agent responded, âSo you write propaganda, right?â
When he said no, the agent kept asking the same question, Watson later recounted in articles in Defense One, The New York Times, and the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Watson then said to the agent, âI am in journalism. Covering national security. And homeland security. And with many of the same skills I used in the U.S. Army as a public affairs officer. Some would argue thatâs propaganda.â But the agent kept repeating, âYou write propaganda, right?â Finally, Watson told him, âFor the purposes of expediting this conversation, yes.â The agent returned his passport and allowed him to pass.
âIâve honestly never had a human attempt to provoke me like this before in my life,â Watson tweeted afterward. âI felt intimidated and bullied,â he told the Times. A few days after that encounter, Acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan said at a press briefing that harassment of journalists by CBP agents is âabsolutely unacceptable, unequivocally.â
In November 2019, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of five American freelance photojournalists who had been stopped and interrogated at border crossings at various times in 2018 and 2019. Each had been taking photographs for American news organizations documenting a giant caravan of Latin American migrants traveling through Mexico toward the U.S. border. Trump had publicly railed against the caravan and put pressure on American and Mexican officials to stop the migrants from entering the U.S.
The lawsuit stated that photographers Mark Abramson, Bing Guan, Go Nakamura, Kitra Cahana, and Ariana Drehsler were each detained at border crossings from Mexico into the U.S. and questioned extensively about details of the caravan. CBP agents inspected some of their notebooks and cameras. All five had been named and pictured in a CBP database of journalists covering the caravan, along with organizers, lawyers, and âinstigators.â After the database was leaked to a San Diego television reporter, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press sued the government for records about it. The CBP confirmed in a letter that it had worked with other U.S. and Mexican agencies to collect information about people âpossibly assisting migrants in crossing the border illegally and/or having some level of participation in the violent incursion eventsâ at border crossings.
âCustom and Border Protection acts like a rogue agency,â Reporters Committee legal director Katie Townsend told me. She cited âsuspicion-less searches of journalists and their phones, notes and equipmentâ and âhostility toward journalistsâ in questioning by CBP agents at border entry points.

Impact outside the U.S.
Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin were in a good mood when they sat down in front of the press at the annual Group of 20 summit meeting in Osaka, Japan, on June 27, 2019. While cameras and microphones were being set up, Trump joked, âGet rid of them.â
Then, to Putin, Trump added, âFake news is a great term, isnât it? You donât have this problem in Russia, but we do.â
âWe also have,â Putin answered in English. âItâs the same.â
In fact, the Russian government already controls major news outlets there, and it has harassed most of its few independent journalists. Since 2000, the year Putin came to power, at least 25 journalists have been murdered there in retaliation for their work, according to CPJ research.
Their exchange was a revealing example of the international reach of Trumpâs treatment of the American press. Authoritarian leaders in other countries have used âfake newsâ as their justification for restricting press freedom, and many of them praised Trumpâs rhetoric as encouragement.
âHis caustic rhetoric and continuing attacks on journalists are echoing around the world,â said University of North Carolina law professor David Ardia, co-director of the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy. âIn other countries, theyâre thinking, âIf the U.S. does not value independent journalism, why should we have it?â Itâs diminishing journalism around the world.â
Between January 2017 and May 2019, at least 26 countries have enacted or introduced laws and government rules restricting online media and journalistic access in the name of fake news, according to Sarah Repucci, vice president for research and analysis for Freedom House. Leaders of Poland, Hungary, Turkey, China, Philippines, and Cambodia are among those cracking down on journalists who have cited the example of Trump and âfake news,â often after meeting with and being praised by him.
âWhat concerns me,â said former White House communications director Dubke, âis that authoritarian leaders who had already placed restrictions on their press are using President Trumpâs words to justify what they are doing. Itâs convenient for them to do so.â
But Trumpâs role is much greater than that, as New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said in a September 2019 speech at Brown University, which was then published in the Times. âIn attacking American media, President Trump has done more than undermine his own citizensâ faith in the news organizations attempting to hold him accountable,â he said. âHe has effectively given foreign leaders permission to do the same with their countriesâ journalists and given them the vocabulary with which to do it.
âTheyâve eagerly embraced the approach,â Sulzberger said, citing research by the Times. âIn the past few years, more than 50 prime ministers, presidents, and other government leaders across five continents have used the term âfake newsâ to justify varying levels of anti-press activity.â Sulzberger listed leaders and officials in Russia, Turkey, Iran, China, Philippines, Hungary, Brazil, Venezuela, Malawi, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Cambodia, Myanmar, Mexico, and Israel as examples.
âI have raised these concerns with President Trump,â Sulzberger said, referring to a July 20, 2018, Oval Office meeting between the two men. âIâve told him that these efforts to attack and suppress independent journalism is what the United States is now inspiring abroad. Though he listened politely and expressed concern, he has continued to escalate his anti-press rhetoric, which has reached new heights as he campaigns for re-election.â
The Trump administration âhas retreated from our countryâs historical role as a defender of the free press,â Sulzberger said. âSeeing that, other countries are targeting journalists with a growing sense of impunity.â
At the end of 2019, at least 250 journalists in countries around the world were jailed in relation to their work, according to CPJâs annual global survey. Three of the worst jailers – Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt – have strong U.S. military, economic, and political ties.
When Saudi assassins murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on October 2, 2018, he was one of 34 journalists killed around the world that year, according to CPJ. The CIA concluded that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the killing and dismemberment of Khashoggi, an outspoken critic of his rule. But Trump has taken no action against the crown prince or Saudi Arabia, while maintaining normal diplomatic, military and economic relations. âThe Trump administration chased potential weapons deals with the Saudis instead of mustering the courage to defend Americaâs values of press freedom and human rights,â Post publisher Fred Ryan wrote on the first anniversary of Khashoggiâs murder.

News media response
How should fact-finding news media and journalists respond to Trumpâs determined efforts to destroy their credibility with the American public?
Trumpâs false statements and attacks on the press have been amplified by partisan media and by digital trolls propagating disinformation, making it increasingly difficult for many Americans to tell truth from propaganda and lies. This partisan divide also complicates the role of the news media in holding the president accountable for his actions, false statements, and attacks – one of the most important functions of the American press – without appearing to be adversarial.
âI think many of our colleagues see the presidentâs attacks, his constant bashing of the media, as a rationale, as an excuse to cross the line themselves, to push back, and that is a big mistake,â Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said in his December 11, 2019, press freedom speech in Washington. âI see it all the time on the front page of major newspapers and the lead of the evening news: fact mixed with opinion, buzzwords like âbombshellâ and âscandal.â The animus of the reporter and editor is as plain to see as the headline.â
âIâve never been so worried about public attitudes about the media,â said Maryland journalism Dean Dalglish. âI wish the media was not so driven by how much they detest the president. Newsrooms do not appear impartial. Editorial comments pop into the text of news stories. I donât think that serves us well.â
David McCraw, deputy general counsel of the New York Times, disagreed somewhat. âOn the press side, there has been an unusual amount of restraint,â he told me. âMainstream news organizations have not engaged in a lot of back and forth. We put ourselves in a difficult position when we are the attack dog rather than the watch dog. We cannot be perceived as partisan in a political debate.â
Washington Post editor Marty Baron famously said at a journalism conference in February 2017, in the early days of the Trump administration, âThe way I view it is, weâre not at war with the administration, weâre at work. Weâre doing our jobs.â
However, changes in the norms of the mainstream news media have contributed to the difficulty that audiences can have in separating fact from opinion. A trend toward increased analysis and reportorial âvoiceâ in news stories, while making them more informative and engaging, can veer into what appears to be opinion or partisanship. Even when labeled properly, news and opinion are intermingled on news websites.
Cable television news networks indiscriminately mix reporting and opinion on the same shows. Newspaper reporters often appear as guests, some under paid contract, in these cable news discussion formats, which makes it difficult for viewers to recognize whether they are stating opinions while explaining the news.
âWe hurt ourselves by going on opinion shows, even though the reporters who go on the shows try not to be opinionated,â Leslie Stahl told me. âJust being there makes it appear that they are opinionated. That used to be forbidden. The dam broke, and itâs a flood now.â
The reporters are brought onto the cable news talk shows âas experts on facts, but the public has a hard time discerning opinion from facts,â Marylandâs Dalglish said. âYou have to be really careful about what shows you go on, unless you work for the opinion page.â
That does not mean that the press should pull back from vigorous accountability reporting about Trump and his administration, which clearly is what he wants. âPoint out his lies, raise issues, but donât be partisan,â ProPublicaâs Steiger told me.
âThe best way to correct the record is for journalists to do good work and to act responsibly,â said Georgia media law professor Jonathan Peters. âThey should make every effort to get the story right and to tell it fairly. They should be as transparent as possible about their reporting.â
However, he said, âIn addition to doing good work and acting responsibly, the press needs to stand up for itself as an institution and for the role of a free press in a democracyâ and âsometimes suspend normal relations with the administration.â
Peters made several illustrative suggestions: âIf an official or a surrogate is known to make false claims, he or she should not appear on news programs or be used as a source. If an official refuses to answer a journalistâs question at a press briefing, the next journalist should ask the same question. If the administration excludes a journalist from an event on the basis of his or her coverage, other journalists should refuse to attend.â
For example, both Peters and Brown, from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, applauded CNN for immediately filing a lawsuit in federal court when the White House revoked the press credential of CNN reporter Jim Acosta in 2018. âIt was important that CNN went to court to show the public the importance of press freedom,â Brown told me.
New York University journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen suggested that news organizations change their coverage of the president âto an emergency setting.â He urged them in his âPress Thinkâ blog to stop live coverage of Trumpâs speeches, rallies and press conferences, no longer participate in his briefings, sprays and gaggles, and not agree to briefings and interviews in which administration officials cannot be named.
Utah media law professor RonNell Anderson Jones also wants the press to do more to fight back. âIt troubles me that journalists are still downplaying the threat to the press that the president and his administration poses,â she said. âThe press is still trying to hold on to its own norms and not get down in the mud with the president. The press needs to advocate to the people for the importance of freedom of the press.â
That is what a coalition of press freedom groups and news organizations are doing. CPJ and Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press last year launched the âProtect Press Freedom Campaign.â In television, radio, digital and print ads, and social media posts, the campaignâs 50 news media and nonprofit group partners are promoting press freedom and the importance of keeping people informed. The Washington Post also started its own Press Freedom Partnership with CPJ, the Reporters Committee and other press freedom groups.
âThis is an opportunity for news organizations to remind the public about the important role press freedom plays in keeping our communities informed,â Brown, of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told me. âIt is not about politics.â
Publishers Sulzberger of The New York Times and Ryan of The Washington Post – and their editorial pages – have publicly taken Trump to task and vigorously defended press freedom in ways that would not be appropriate for their news pages. âThey are the appropriate people to respond,â Times lawyer McCraw said, âeditorial writers, publishers, press groups.â
I had expected the 2020 election campaign to test how the press was evolving in its response to Trumpâs attacks on its credibility, as it may still. But the COVID-19 pandemic already has posed a much greater test. The press has a crucial dual role: informing Americans as fully as possible about the health and economic crisis – and thoroughly scrutinizing how the federal, state, and local governments and the private sector are responding. That includes aggressive reporting to hold the president and his administration accountable for how they are steering the country through this dangerous storm.
At this writing, I believe the news media have been rising to that challenge, despite increasingly difficult working conditions. Despite early public skepticism about the performance of the press, the audiences for broadcast network and cable news and newspaper websites have grown immensely. That may well increase both Trumpâs preoccupation with coverage of him and the intensity of his attacks on the press as the election nears. While almost everything about American life continues to change rapidly and unpredictably, the importance of the press and how it meets that challenge will only grow.

Recommendations
The Committee to Protect Journalists makes the following recommendations to the Trump administration:
- Publicly recognize and affirm the role of a free press in a democracy and refrain from delegitimizing or discrediting the media or journalists performing their vital function — not least during a public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. Refrain from vilifying individual journalists and media outlets, including on Twitter.
- Resume daily press briefings and ensure that reporters independently credentialed by the White House Correspondents Association are granted access. Ensure journalists and their associations have equal and fair access to the White House and State Department and are not punished for unfavorable coverage.
- Speak to reporters on the record and avoid over-reliance on confidential briefings. Avoid the perception of political favoritism by granting presidential interviews to a range of news outlets, not just those that produce favorable coverage.
- Do not retaliate against media outlets by interfering or threatening to interfere in the financial independence of their owners. Refrain from threats to rescind the broadcasting licenses of television and radio stations regarded as critical of the administration or its supporters.
- Instruct all government departments to ensure timely compliance with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests without regard to the media organizations or reporters filing those requests.
- Implement, at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the recommendations laid out in CPJâs 2018 report âNothing to Declare,â including requiring a warrant for device searches and releasing transparency reports about such searches.
- Prohibit DHS and CBP agents from asking journalists about their beats, opinions, contacts, or coverage. Provide the information related to CBP as requested in the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by CPJ and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) without further delay.
- End the practice of bringing espionage charges against news sources who leak classified information to journalists, as it creates a chilling effect and restricts the free flow of information on matters of public interest. Drop the espionage charges against Julian Assange and cease efforts to extradite him to the U.S.
- Order the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to comply with the requirement, under the National Defense Authorization Act, to provide an unclassified report to Congress listing individuals determined to be involved in any way in the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Impose sanctions on those deemed to be responsible, including Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman.