By David K. Shipler
It might be
time to recognize that President Trump’s tweets and ill-tempered outbursts
about the press are not just scattered impulses but part of a foundation being carefully
laid to stifle investigative reporting and robust expression by the country’s
news organizations. And a large plurality of Americans will be with him, as he
showed during the campaign, when roars of approval greeted his threatening
vilification of reporters covering his rallies.
Now, in
office, he and his new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, are in a position to
test the limits of the First Amendment by various means, including legal
actions that might be too expensive for any but the major news outlets to
withstand. These could include extreme measures to silence government
whistleblowers, aggressive demands on reporters to identify their confidential
sources, and even moves to prosecute editors for publishing classified
information. A Trump administration might make another attempt at prior restraint,
which was repelled in 1971 by the Supreme Court, 6-3, when the Nixon administration
tried to block publication of the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the
Vietnam War.
Some responsible
news organizations are already bracing for the onslaught and have redoubled
their efforts to dig beneath the visible news. They now include on their
websites instructions on how to use various encrypted communications to “share news tips with us confidentially,” as The
Washington Post explains. The Post,
The New York Times, and The New Yorker, for example, include
links to such mechanisms as WhatsApp, Signal, SecureDrop, Strongbox, and Pidgin,
with details on how much information about sender and receiver is retained by
the providers. Even where the texts of messages are encrypted, some providers keep
metadata—users’ phone numbers, email addresses, and time stamps—which could be
subpoenaed by government to show that an official has been in contact with a
reporter.
These invitations to get in touch
are useful, but they’re passive. The press also needs to assign beat reporters
to regulatory agencies that have never received much day-in, day-out coverage.
Getting into the weeds where mid-level officials reside, and finding what the
columnist James Reston used to call “the man with the unhappy look on his face,”
is essential for documenting the subtler shifts in rules and enforcement that
are likely under Trump and the team of dismantlers he has assembled.
