Thank you SO much for reading Pressing the last two years and to all who have donated to keep it going. I have paused the subscription feature so anyone donating through that means will not be charged from here forward. If you’ve recently donated and want a refund, please let me know—no hard feelings at all.

Please stay subscribed, though! You’ll receive fewer emails from me, but I would like to keep writing Pressing on an occasional basis. And one day, I’d love to start it up for real again.

In the mean time, you can find my professional writing at Quartz (qz.com)!

Thanks so much for reading about press freedom and online speech.

See you soon,

Scott

This is the 73rd issue of Pressing and it’s great to have you with me. Please send me feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and tips at sgnover@gmail.com.

Injustice Department

For weeks, the U.S. Department of Justice has been under fire for revelations that, largely during the Trump administration, it sought phone and email records of journalists, high-profile Democrats in Congress, and others.

The government seized the records of journalists’ from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, and subpoenaed other news organizations, including USA Today. The department even sent gag orders to newsroom leaders so they could not inform their own editorial staff of what was happening.

This spells out a classic abuse of power: Investigating journalists’ secret government sources, and political rivals is the mark of serious overreach.

Tech companies have also been roped in: The DOJ subpoenaed both Microsoft and Apple, the latter of which revealed that in 2018 it turned over records to Trump’s DOJ about his own White House counsel, Don McGahn. Microsoft CEO Brad Smith wrote in The Washington Post, “We need changes in Justice Department policies to tighten the use of gag orders and probes of Congress and the news media.”

Fortunately, Biden’s Justice Department, under which the leak investigations continued, has promised to stop subpoenaing news organizations for information about journalists’ sources.

“Going forward, consistent with the President's direction, this Department of Justice – in a change to its longstanding practice – will not seek compulsory legal process in leak investigations to obtain source information from members of the news media doing their jobs,” a DOJ spokesperson said in a statement.

These ugly investigations into government leakers threatens the freedom of the press and whistleblowers who often choose to risk their jobs and personal safety to inform the press about goings on in the government. While the Trump administration exemplified everything wrong with political hardball in America—including constant attacks on journalists and political rivals—the Biden administration doesn’t have to be like that.

The government should respect the role that journalists, political opponents, tech companies, and whistleblowers play in our country—and generally do the opposite of whatever the Trump administration did.

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Whistleblower Jailed

Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards pleaded guilty to providing confidential financial documents to BuzzFeed News earlier this month. Edwards provided suspicious activities reports (SARs) from her work at the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) which exposed fishy payments to Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and formed the basis for BuzzFeed’s expansive FinCEN Files series.

In a New York Times op-ed, BuzzFeed News editor in chief Mark Schoofs called on President Joe Biden to pardon Edwards and change the Justice Department’s methods for prosecuting leakers. “If Mr. Biden really wants to fight corruption and bring transparency to global finance, he should pardon Ms. Edwards,” Schoofs wrote. “He should also demand that the Justice Department, when deciding whether to prosecute someone who provides journalists with sensitive information, take into account the public importance of what the disclosures reveal.”

Twitter Blocked in Nigeria

After Twitter deleted a post by Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari, which threatened secessionist groups, the government blocked Twitter in the entire country.

In response, Twitter called on Nigeria to respect the open internet and reinstate its service in the country.

The company has also been in a standoff with regulators in India recently, a crucial country for its business but also one that has been increasingly willing to interfere with the open internet and block certain apps.

In Other News:

• Associated Press: Journalists demanding more action against online harassment (David Bauder)

• CNN: DOJ argues it should substitute for Trump as defendant in E. Jean Carroll lawsuit (Erica Orden)

• Committee to Protect Journalists: Mexican reporter Luis Aguilar survives knife attack in Pénjamo

• The Nation: We’re Suing Google. Here’s Why. (Katrina vanden Heuvel)

• The New York Times: Google Seeks to Break Vicious Cycle of Online Slander (Kashmir Hill and Daisuke Wakabayashi)

• Vice: Bing Censors Image Search for 'Tank Man' Even in US (Joseph Cox)

• The Washington Post: Biden shouldn’t be shy about fixing one of Trump’s most destructive legacies (Jason Rezaian)

• The Washington Post: American journalist is detained by Myanmar regime while trying to leave country (Shibani Mahtani)

Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Like what you read and want to support me? Consider donating via a paid subscription here. I’ll see you next Tuesday! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.

This is the 72nd issue of Pressing and it’s great to have you with me. Please send me feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and tips at sgnover@gmail.com.

AP, Al Jazeera Offices Destroyed in Gaza

Amid a severe military escalation in Israel and the Palestinian territories, the Israeli government leveled an apartment building in Gaza on Saturday.

The 12-story building, destroyed in an airstrike, also contained regional bureaus for the Associated Press, a U.S.-based news organization, and Al Jazeera, a Qatari-funded media network.

The Israeli military, the IDF, gave a one-hour advance warning so all occupants could evacuate the building. But why did they destroy the property in the first place? The IDF claims that Hamas, the terrorist organization that effectively controls Gaza, was operating out of that very building. Therefore, it was a legitimate military target, the Israelis said.

So far, though, the Israelis have provided no evidence that Hamas was operating out of the building. And even if they were, the complete destruction of a crucial media office in wartime—unless in the case of a severe, imminent and incontrovertible threat—is unacceptable. The ordeal seems, from an outsider’s perspective, avoidable.

“We are shocked and horrified that the Israeli military would target and destroy the building housing AP’s bureau and other news organizations in Gaza,” said AP president and CEO Gary Pruitt in a statement. “The world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today.”

While the U.S. government has unflinchingly supported the far-right nationalist Netanyahu regime even during this latest flare-up of the conflict, the White House has at least condemned the threat posed to journalists.

“We have communicated directly to the Israelis that ensuring the safety and security of journalists and independent media is a paramount responsibility,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted Saturday.

When CNN’s Brian Stelter interviewed IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus on Sunday, he pressed Conricus to offer some public evidence of Hamas’ presence in the building.

“Not only were Hamas in the building, they were actively using it to fight Israel,” Conricus said. But he said the evidence is “in process” and will come to light “in due time.”

Stelter suggested to Conricus that proper evidence should have been presented to media ahead of time—so they would be aware of the threat of working in the same building as Hamas—but if not then, at least in the hours after the attack.

Despite the Biden administration’s intense support for Israel—the president only called for a ceasefire last night—U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken confirmed he has not been presented with any evidence by the Israelis that Hamas was in the building.

Press freedom groups have condemned the attacks, but Reporters Without Borders has gone further, requesting that the International Criminal Court investigate the attack as a possible war crime. The AP’s outgoing top editor, Sally Buzbee, also called for an independent investigation into the incident.

This newsletter is about press freedom, so I’m going to draw the cutoff line in my critique here.

As an American Jew I have complicated feelings about the decades-long conflict and the current flare-up, but I support human rights and press freedom in all cases.

I also support self-determination for both the Israelis and Palestinians and full civil rights for Arabs living in Israel.

Beyond that, I’ll let you—the distinguishing reader—make sense of this troubling conflict for yourself.

But I’ll leave you with this: reporters need to be able to do their jobs on the ground, finding truth even in the fog of war. Israel’s bombing of the AP and Al Jazeera bureaus is, among other things, an affront to press freedom.

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I want to add another caveat to my above writing. This is something I wrote a few weeks ago about the Black Lives Matter protests and the focus on press freedom in that context. I think part of it applies here:

Often people—even fellow journalists—belittle the outcry about injustices toward press, remarking that journalists are no more important than peaceful protesters. In a way, I agree. With the exception of administrative carveouts for journalists that allow us to bypass curfews and other restrictions, journalists and protesters alike enjoy First Amendment protections. And, as Sidner remarked, it feels like little separates journalists from everyday citizens.

I’ll conclude with two thoughts on this matter. First, professional journalists are just doing their jobs. They may or may not feel impassioned one way or another about the protests they are covering, but they need to be free to move about and cover the events as they unfold. Second, I see abuses toward journalists as a tip-of-the-iceberg issue.

If credentialed journalists are treated this poorly, you can easily imagine how police treat everyone else.

In Other News

• Belsat: Photojournalist Tatsyana Kapitonava gets 10-day jail term in Belarus

• The Daily Beast: Trump DOJ Tried to Unmask User Behind Devin Nunes Parody Twitter Account (Justin Rohrlich)

• The Daily Caller: Baltimore’s Top Prosecutor Asks FCC To Investigate Fox Affiliate Over Negative Coverage, Tucker Carlson’s Show (Thomas Catenacci)

• The New York Times: I’ll Take ‘White Supremacist Hand Gestures’ for $1,000 (Ben Smith)

• The New York Times: Secret Sharers: The Hidden Ties Between Private Spies and Journalists (Barry Meier)

• RCFP: Subpoena for sources, records related to Washington Post journalist’s college reporting is improper and invalid, RCFP argues

• Rest of World: Fact-checking Modi’s India (Sonia Faleiro)

• Vanity Fair: Prince Harry Called the First Amendment “Bonkers” and Gave Some Talking Heads an Excuse to Relitigate the Revolutionary War (Emily Kirkpatrick)

• The Washington Post: The Washington Post will soon have a woman as its top editor. And yes, that matters. (Margaret Sullivan)

• The Washington Post: Reality Winner was the FBI’s ‘head on a pike’ for Trump. It’s time to set her free. (Margaret Sullivan)

• The Washington Post: After spreading false claims, Michigan Republican wants to register, fine fact-checkers: ‘You better be right’ (Katie Shepherd)

Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Like what you read and want to support me? Consider donating via a paid subscription here. I’ll see you next Tuesday! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.

This is the 71st issue of Pressing and it’s great to have you with me. Please send me feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and tips at sgnover@gmail.com.

A Cheerleader Goes to the Supreme Court

“Fuck school, fuck softball, fuck cheer, fuck everything,” Brandi Levy posted on Snapchat in 2017. That post on social media—made on a weekend, outside of her public school’s grounds—is now the subject of a major First Amendment case in the hands of the Supreme Court.

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court’s nine justices will hear oral arguments for Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., the case concerning whether the Pennsylvania school district violated Levy’s constitutional protections in suspending her from the school cheerleading squad for her off-campus comments.

The Court precedent that most directly applies is the 1969 case Tinker v. Des Moines, in which the justices ruled in favor of Mary Beth Tinker, a public school student in Iowa who wore a black armband to school in protest of the Vietnam War. The ruling established the Tinker test, which determines whether student speech is substantially disruptive insomuch that a public school administration can stifle that speech in the name of preserving order at the school. You may recognize this quote from Tinker:

“It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” — Tinker v. Des Moines (1969)

Levy has won in federal district court and federal appeals court, so the Court’s decision to hear it is rather worrying for me and others who hope Levy wins out.

Frank LoMonte at the University of Florida argued most eloquently in favor of Levy in a recent Slate article:

It is one thing to say that a school can dictate how students speak to one another in class, but quite another to say that it has equal authority to dictate how students speak to the entire world, and that all speech must always be suitable for the classroom.

This proposition is clear in normal times, but we are certainly not living in normal times. The Zoom-ification of public school presents an interesting contextual challenge for Levy and her legal team at the American Civil Liberties Union. With students behind screens, could an off-screen activity disrupt virtual school? Potentially. But, the context of this case is crucial. This is speech that happened away from school on a weekend in 2017—and Levy was punished for it.

Other opponents of Levy, including the Biden administration for some reason, assert that restricting schools’ abilities to censor speech also limits their abilities to prevent harassment and bullying. Here’s LoMonte:

That’s nonsense. Speech that is severe enough to violate state bullying laws is already unprotected by the First Amendment, which allows the government to punish harassment.

Judge Cheryl Ann Krause, an Obama appointee on the Third Circuit, which upheld the district court opinion, implied that a victory for the school district would curb students’ free speech rights in all walks of life, a troubling idea in a time when teenagers engage in an ungodly amount of digital communication every day outside of school.

“New communicative technologies open new territories where regulators might seek to suppress speech they consider inappropriate, uncouth, or provocative,” Krause wrote. “And we cannot permit such efforts, no matter how well intentioned, without sacrificing precious freedoms that the First Amendment protects.”

LoMonte says that the Levy decision will almost certainly impact public college and university students too. “Every time the Supreme Court has decided a First Amendment case at the K–12 level, college lawyers have raced to court and convinced judges to afford them the same level of control,” he said.

“Regardless of how the Supreme Court may hedge its opinion, the reality is that Levy’s case will set the standard for adult-age college students for decades. And while losing a year of extracurricular activities might be survivable for a 14-year-old, it could be devastating for a 19-year-old. Being kicked off a sports team can mean losing free college tuition, a place to live, a meal plan, and health coverage.”

Wednesday will bring oral arguments for Levy’s case. Every student and parent who relies on America’s public schools should pay attention.

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World Press Freedom Day Is On May 3

Remembering Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington 10 Years Later

Ten years ago, the targeted killings of photojournalists Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington in Libya sent shockwaves through media and human rights circles. Hondros was a two-time Pulitzer finalist and Hetherington was an Academy Award nominee for his documentary Restrepo, which he directed with Sebastian Junger.

• CNN: Opinion: A decade later, Tim Hetherington's work lives on (Peter Bergen)

• Time: What We Learned From Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington (Olivier Laurent) - From 2016

• Voice of America: How Arab Spring Changed Culture of Journalist Safety (Sirwan Kajjo, Ezel Sahinkaya, Namo Abdulla)

In Other News:

• CNN: Hong Kong's press freedom is under attack (Kristie Lu Stout)

• Committee to Protect Journalists: Colombian journalist Luis Carlos Ayala survives shooting

• Committee to Protect Journalists: Uzbek journalist Sid Yanyshev charged over corruption reporting

• Minneapolis Star-Tribune: Opinion: Minnesota should be America's 'Nordic model' on press freedom (John Rash)

• The New Republic: The Supreme Court Could Get Dragged Into the Cancel Culture Wars (Matt Ford)

• Politico: Facebook oversight board's newest member voiced skepticism about Trump ban (Cristiano Lima)

• Reason: How Press Freedom—and Section 230—Led to Derek Chauvin's Conviction (Nick Gillespie)

• The Wall Street Journal: China Censors ‘Nomadland’ Director Chloé Zhao’s Oscar Win (Liza Lin)

• The Washington Post: By bearing witness — and hitting ‘record’ — 17-year-old Darnella Frazier may have changed the world (Margaret Sullivan)

New Press Freedom Index

Reporters Without Borders recently released its World Press Freedom Index, an annual ranking every country by media freedom. The United States fell one spot to 44th as Norway held its number one spot for the fifth year running.

• Axios: Global press freedom deteriorates amid pandemic (Dave Lawler)

• Politico Europe: European states slip in media freedom rankings amid rising violence (Lili Bayer)

Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Like what you read and want to support me? Consider donating via a paid subscription here. I’ll see you next Tuesday! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.

This is the 70th issue of Pressing and it’s great to have you with me. Please send me feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and tips at sgnover@gmail.com.

More Protests and More Arrests

The last couple of weeks have felt eerily familiar. As the Derek Chauvin trial has been underway, new protests have sprung up after new police murders of Black Americans. New protests means new arrests for peaceful protesters and journalists covering them.

First, let’s take a look at the Chauvin trial. David Bauder at the Associated Press wrote a lovely piece about the emotional toll the trial has taken on Black journalists. “I guess I have sort of compartmentalized what is happening,” Minneapolis Public Radio reporter Brandt Williams told him. “It’s like when a first responder comes across a scene that is bloody. You can set aside your feelings and do your job.”

Another reporter quoted in that story is CNN’s Sara Sidner.

Sidner, who is doing yeoman’s work covering the Chauvin trial, has also reported live on air from the protests that sprung up in Brooklyn Center, Minn., right outside of Minneapolis, after police killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright. But Sidner had a tense, on-camera moment with a protester who felt frustrated with the media narratives around the protests.

“What I think about this? All the press and all the shit y’all do makes this worse,” the unnamed man said to Sidner, later accusing the media of “twisting up the story,” though he didn’t specify how.

On CNN’s Reliable Sources this Sunday, Sidner explained the role of journalists covering protests. “We're out here to tell the story... we're just reflecting what is happening in society,” she said.

Sidner continued: “The media, whether you call it mainstream media or not—everyone has their own little TV station and they’re all broadcasting all the time,” she said, holding up her iPhone. “So, attacking us isn’t doing a whole lot of good.” She conceded that television cameras can have some negative externalities in protest zones, but said it’s her job to tell the story of what’s happening on the ground.

Last year, after George Floyd’s murder, I reported on the mass arrests of journalists covering the nationwide protests. In the wake of Wright’s killing, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has recoded at least nine assaults of journalists, six arrests and multiple seizures of equipment from those covering the recent protests.

Adam Gray, a British photojournalist, was “pushed to the ground, handcuffed, and cited with failure to follow a lawful order” on Apr. 13. Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Andy Mannix was hit in the foot with a less-lethal round. And a three-person Fox News team was detained the next day.

One of the most disturbing charges comes from CNN producer Carolyn Sung, who said state troopers grabbed her by her backpack, “threw her to the ground, zip-tying her hands behind her back” as she attempted to leave the scene. One trooper yelled “Do you speak English?” at Sung, who is Asian American and she was taken into custody. At the nearby jail, she was “patted down and searched by a female officer who put her hands down Sung’s pants and in her bra.” The allegations by Sung are one of many cited in a letter sent by attorney Leita Walker of the firm Ballard Spahr on behalf of more than 25 news organizations including the AP, The New York Times, and BuzzFeed News.

• You can read a copy of the letter here.

Additionally, a number of journalists were forced onto the ground Friday night while covering the protests and were not released until police photographed their faces and press credentials.

This happened just hours after a federal judge in Minnesota issued a temporary order forbidding the state patrol from using force against journalists.

By Sunday, Governor Tim Walz said he was embarrassed about how police treated journalists covering the protests.

Often people—even fellow journalists—belittle the outcry about injustices toward press, remarking that journalists are no more important than peaceful protesters. In a way, I agree. With the exception of administrative carveouts for journalists that allow us to bypass curfews and other restrictions, journalists and protesters alike enjoy First Amendment protections. And, as Sidner remarked, it feels like little separates journalists from everyday citizens.

I’ll conclude with two thoughts on this matter. First, professional journalists are just doing their jobs. They may or may not feel impassioned one way or another about the protests they are covering, but they need to be free to move about and cover the events as they unfold. Second, I see abuses toward journalists as a tip-of-the-iceberg issue.

If credentialed journalists are treated this poorly, you can easily imagine how police treat everyone else.

If you would like to donate to keep Pressing going, you may do so through a “paid subscription” below. Or you can “buy me a coffee” through this link. Pressing is a free newsletter, but any contributions allow me to keep producing this newsletter for everyone each week.

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Bainum Loses Key Partner in Tribune Bid

A much-praised deal to rescue Tribune newspapers from the clutches of Alden Global Capital—a firm notorious for cutting resources for journalists to boost profit margins—appears to have fallen through on Monday.

The rival bidder, billionaire hotel magnate Stewart Bainum, was mounting a serious bid to buy all of the Tribune papers and sell most to local investors while retaining ownership of his hometown newspaper The Baltimore Sun, Bainum lost a key investment partner in the Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss. With Wyss out of the picture, The Chicago Tribune and Poynter reported that the deal is currently unlikely to happen.

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Below, you’ll find A LOT OF LINKS! These are the biggest stories in global press freedom, media law, the news industry, tech and society. Have something that you think should go in next week’s issue? Email me at sgnover@gmail.com.

Global Press Freedom

• Associated Press: Inside secret Syria talks aimed at freeing American hostages (Ben Fox, Eric Tucker, and Matthew Lee)

• The Atlantic: The Awful Wisdom of the Hostage (Graeme Wood)

• CNN: Hong Kong court jails Jimmy Lai and other prominent activists for 8 to 18 months over 2019 protest (Eric Cheung)

• Committee to Protect Journalists: Russian law enforcement raid apartment, interrogate journalist Roman Anin

• The Daily Beast: Israeli Snoop-for-Hire Posed as a Fox News Journalist for a Spy Operation (Adam Rawnsley)

• Glenn Greenwald: My New Book on Journalism, Exposing Corruption, and the Resulting Risks, Dangers and Societal Changes

• The Hill: CNN's Chance among journalists detained while covering Navalny imprisonment (Thomas Moore)

• NBC News: He was praised after the movie 'Hotel Rwanda,' now Paul Rusesabagina faces terrorism charges (Michael Fiorentino)

• The New York Times: BBC Correspondent Leaves China, Citing Growing Risks (Amy Qin)

• The New York Times: Cambodians Demand Apology for Khmer Rouge Images With Smiling Faces (Seth Mydans)

• The New York Times: Myanmar Soldiers, Aiming to Silence Protests, Target Journalists (Richard C. Paddock)

• The New York Times: India’s News Upstarts Challenged Modi. New Rules Could Tame Them. (Mujib Mashal and Hari Kumar)

• BuzzFeed News: I Thought My Job Was To Report On Technology In India. Instead, I Got A Front-Row Seat To The Decline Of My Democracy. (Pranav Dixit)

• Reuters: Press freedom in Macau’s gambling hub under spotlight as China ramps up scrutiny (Clare Jim and Farah Master)

• Vice World News: How CNN’s Myanmar Trip Started a Debate Over Parachute Journalism (Heather Chen and Joe Freeman)

• The Washington Post: Justice may finally arrive for photojournalist slain in Libya (Jason Rezaian)

Media Law Matters

• Axios: Former Rep. Katie Hill loses lawsuit against Daily Mail over nude photos (Orion Rummler)

• Columbia Journalism Review: What a costly lawsuit against investigative reporting looks like (D. Victoria Baranetsky and Alexandra Gutierrez)

• The New York Times: One America News Network Stays True to Trump (Rachel Abrams)

• Politico: Appeals court rejects academic’s libel suit over claims of affair with Flynn (Josh Gerstein)

• Slate: Clarence Thomas’ Attack on Social Media Companies Is a Paranoid Marxist Delusion (Mark Joseph Stern)

• The Washington Post: The problem with cheering for the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News (Margaret Sullivan)

• The Washington Post: Former intelligence analyst Daniel Hale pleads guilty to leaking classified information (Rachel Weiner)

Around the Newsroom

• CNN: America's newsrooms are reckoning with their mass shooting coverage (Alexis Benveniste)

• The Daily Princetonian: Eight papers, eight women: Ivy League journalists reflect on leadership, priorities (Nhuquynh Nguyen and Liana Slomka)

• The New Yorker: The Deceit and Conflict Behind the Leak of the Pentagon Papers (Ben Bradlee, Jr.)

• The Washington Post: The Trump White House provided reporters with a gusher of leaks. With Biden, everything’s changed. (Paul Farhi)

• The Washington Post: Tucker Carlson villainizes journalists on his top-rated show. Then the threats pour in. (Jeremy Barr)

Tech and Society

• Decrypt: Edward Snowden NFT Sells for $5.4 Million in Ethereum (Jeff Benson)

• Gizmodo: We're Archiving Yahoo Answers So You'll Always Know How Babby Is Formed (Dhruv Mehrotra and Shoshana Wodinsky)

• The New Republic: Twitter Is Enabling Saudi Arabia’s Brutal Crackdown on Dissent (Jacob Silverman)

• NPR: This News Publisher Quit Facebook. Readership Went Up (Shannon Bond)

• NPR: 'Stop Lying': Muslim Rights Group Sues Facebook Over Claims It Removes Hate Groups (Bobby Allyn)

• NPR: Falun Gong, Steve Bannon And The Trump-Era Battle Over Internet Freedom (David Folkenflik)

• Politico: National Archives can’t resurrect Trump’s tweets, Twitter says (Quint Forgey)

• Politico: Trump faces a narrow path to victory against Facebook suspension (Cristiano Lima)

• Protocol: For Big Tech whistleblowers, there’s no such thing as 'moving on' (Issie Lapowsky)

• Thomsen Reuters Foundation: China found using surveillance firms to help write ethnic-tracking specs (Avi Asher-Shapiro)

• The Wall Street Journal: Google’s Secret ‘Project Bernanke’ Revealed in Texas Antitrust Case (Jeff Horwitz and Keach Hagey)

• Wired: Polarization Isn't America's Biggest Problem—or Facebook's (Shannon McGregor and Daniel Kreiss)

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Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Like what you read and want to support me? Consider donating via a paid subscription here. I’ll see you next Tuesday! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.

This is the 69th issue of Pressing and it’s great to have you with me. Please send me feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and tips at sgnover@gmail.com.

Today is a short issue! Your inboxes are cluttered and so is my head. So, I’ve got some news and recommended reads for you about press freedom, the media, and more.

Thanks and I’ll see you all next week!

What’s New?

• Associated Press reporter Thein Zaw was released from detention in Myanmar on Wednesday, three weeks after he was arrested while covering the military coup in Yangon. (AP)

• Amnesty International named Agnes Callamard its new Secretary General. Callamard was the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions. In that role, she investigated the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. (AP)

• Callamard recently revealed that a senior Saudi official issued multiple death threats to her during the investigation. (Guardian)

• A Brazilian court ordered President Jair Bolsonaro to pay journalist Patrícia Campos Mello around $3,500 in damages for disparaging comments he made about her, in which he claimed she offered sex to a source for information about him. (BBC)

• The L.A.P.D. arrested multiple reporters, including James Queally of The Los Angeles Times and Kate Cagle of Spectrum News 1 SoCal, at a demonstration at an Echo Park homeless camp. In total, at least five journalists and multiple legal observers were detained. (WaPo)

• The Guinean journalist Amadou Diouldé Diallo was detained for criticizing the president. Guinea’s 2010 press law criminalizes insulting the president, which the reporter allegedly did on a TV broadcast. (CPJ)

• The Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez has repeatedly criticized her employer for its policy banning her from reporting on issues involving sexual assault or harassment because she is a sexual assault survivor. On Monday, the Post reversed its decision. (Politico)

If you would like to donate to keep Pressing going, you may do so through a “paid subscription” below. Or you can “buy me a coffee” through this link. Pressing is a free newsletter, but any contributions allow me to keep producing this newsletter for everyone each week.

Subscribe now

Read Last Week’s Issue:

“It should be borne in mind that the first step taken by any potential authoritarian or dictatorial regime is to gain control of communications, particularly the delivery of news,” a judge wrote, quite correctly, in a recent dissenting opinion.

From there he devolved: “It is fair to conclude, therefore, that one-party control of the press and media is a threat to a viable democracy.”

I think it’s safe to say Judge Laurence Silberman doesn’t like the American press […]

[Read more here.]

Recommended Reads

• CJR: Reporters hype—then waste—Biden’s first press conference (Jon Allsop)

• CJR: Covering the Atlanta massacre from inside the Korean community (Shinhee Kang)

• Lawfare: Here’s Merrick Garland’s Orientation Memo for the Trump-Era Hangover on Press Freedom (Bruce Brown and Gabe Rottman)

• Newsweek: 'Egypt is Holding My Cousin Hostage' (Sherif Mansour)

• Vanity Fair: “I’m Afraid to Open Twitter”: Next-Level Harassment of Female Journalists Is Putting News Outlets to the Test (Charlotte Klein)

• The Washington Post: Opinion: I’m a photojournalist. Why is the administration banning me from border facilities? (John Moore)

Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Like what you read and want to support me? Consider donating via a paid subscription here. I’ll see you next Tuesday! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.

This is the 68th issue of Pressing and it’s great to have you with me. Please send me feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and tips at sgnover@gmail.com.

Judge Silberman is Sorely Confused

“It should be borne in mind that the first step taken by any potential authoritarian or dictatorial regime is to gain control of communications, particularly the delivery of news,” a judge wrote, quite correctly, in a recent dissenting opinion.1

From there he devolved: “It is fair to conclude, therefore, that one-party control of the press and media is a threat to a viable democracy.”

I think it’s safe to say Judge Laurence Silberman doesn’t like the American press. He thinks it’s biased. He thinks it’s controlled by “one party”—guess which one. He thinks the Democrats, the media and Silicon Valley are in cahoots. And he thinks this combination of factors—dare I say this conspiracy of epic proportions—is a threat to American democracy.

Through this lens, Silberman authored a dizzying dissenting opinion from his perch at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The case was a defamation appeal from two Liberian officials who sued the human rights nonprofit Global Witness over a report claiming they accepted bribes from Exxon Mobil.

But for public officials the standard for defamation lawsuits is higher than for the standard for run-of-the-mill citizens who feel they’ve been slandered or libeled. Public officials—or public figures for that matter—need to demonstrate actual malice, a legal standard that involves demonstrating that the speaker—in this case Global Witness—acted with “knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”2

That brings us to New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the landmark Supreme Court case from 1964 that established this standard.3 Surprise, surprise. Judge Silberman is not a fan.

Here’s a list of things Judge Silberman believes, according to this opinion:

• The Sullivan ruling should be overturned.

• “ Justice [Clarence] Thomas has already persuasively demonstrated that New York Times was a policy-driven decision masquerading as constitutional law.”

• Overturning the ruling would be unlikely in part because doing so would “incur the wrath of press and media.”

• Sullivan has “increased the power of the media” and “allows the press to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity.”

• America is “very close to one-party control” of the media.

• The New York Times and The Washington Post are “virtually Democratic Party broadsheets” and the “news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction.” The Associated Press, “most large papers across the country,” “nearly all television” (which he calls a “Democratic Party trumpet”), and the “government-supported” National Public Radio all skew left.

• Silicon Valley has an “enormous influence over the distribution of news” and “filters news delivery in ways favorable to the Democratic Party.”

• Fox News, The New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page are the only non-liberal news outlets. (“It should be sobering for those concerned about news bias that these institutions are controlled by a single man and his son.”)

• The First Amendment “is not an adequate excuse for big tech’s bias,” and “repression of political speech by large institutions with market power” is “fundamentally un-American.”

Sigh.

Dear readers of this newsletter, I hope I don’t need to enumerate for you the ways in which this kind of thinking is bonkers. If you’ve stuck with me for any stretch of time in the nearly two years I’ve been writing this newsletter, then we are probably on the same page.

But I’ll leave you with a few thoughts: First, this isn’t really a legal takedown of Sullivan as much as it is a wide-ranging list of grievances about media and technology companies that reflect a Hannity-esque4, or Trumpian5, ideology.

The planet in which Judge Silberman resides sounds truly frightful. There is a far-reaching cabal of liberal journalists dead-set on advancing a core set of beliefs that will completely plunge the country into the throes of authoritarianism.

The backdrop of the case—which is about bribe-taking Liberian officials lest we forget—is irrelevant. Since Sullivan is relevant, the esteemed jurist took it upon himself to add a few thoughts on his own about why the media is bad—and, I presume, should be more easily sued. (Shall I point out the irony that he leans on articles by Politico and The Atlantic, among others, to make his claims?)

Judge Silberman is not alone, unfortunately. Justice Clarence Thomas offered a shockingly similar attack on Sullivan a couple of years ago, calling the case and those supporting it “policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law.”6 Justice Antonin Scalia said he abhorred the Sullivan decision:

“You can libel public figures at will so long as somebody told you something, some reliable person told you the lie that you then publicized to the whole world — that’s what New York Times v. Sullivan says.”

But, the protections that Sullivan offers are crucial for the free press, and that’s pretty much withstood the test of time.

One of the main roles of reporters—as clichéd as it may sound—is to hold power to account. In that spirit, and one consistent with the First Amendment, the Court has long held that government officials and public figures are held to a very high standard for what constitutes defamation. A court needs to find that a speaker knew what they were publishing or saying was false—or that they really, really, really didn’t care whether it was true or false—in order for a government official or public figure to win a defamation suit.

Without Sullivan, journalists could be found liable for every unflattering thing they write about a politician or celebrity.

If Silberman wished to advance a historically founded argument as to why the First Amendment was never intended to provide these sorts of protections to press, then I would read with keen interest.

He didn’t do that.

Read smarter take-downs of the good Judge Silberman here:

• Above the Law: What In the Q Is This Federal Judge Going On About? (Kathryn Rubio)

• Esquire: A Federal Judge Went Full Hannity. Never Go Full Hannity. (Charles Pierce)

• Politico: Federal judge pens dissent slamming decades-old press protections

• Slate: Federal Judge Uses Dissent to Rant About Liberal Media Bias and “Big Tech” Censorship (Mark Joseph Stern)

• Techdirt: Appeals Court Judge Attacks Fundamental Principle Of 1st Amendment Law, Because He Thinks The Media Likes Democrats Too Much (Mike Masnick)

• The Washington Post: Opinion: Trump’s attacks on the press were bad. What this federal judge did was worse. (Ruth Marcus)

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In the Headlines

• Bloomberg Opinion: Jack Ma Was Good for Press Freedom in Hong Kong (Matthew Brooker)

• The Boston Globe: Press freedom is under attack in Latin America. Biden can help defend it (Editorial Board)

• CNN: Media freedom fight threatens to escalate UK-China tensions

• The Conversation: Why lawsuits against the media may not hurt freedom of the press (Nancy Costello)

• CPJ: Morocco’s new tactic to punish journalists: charge them with sex crimes (M ElHaies)

• The Economist: Press freedom under pressure

• The Financial Times: UK ambassador rebuffs Beijing broadside against press freedom comments (Yuan Yang)

• Insider: Iranian journalist, who won the International Press Freedom Award, was detained in Turkey after fleeing a nearly 5-year prison sentence (Erin Snodgrass)

• NPR: EU Criticized For Slow Response To Hungary's Crackdown On Press Freedom (Rob Shmitz)

• Reuters: India's digital media regulation sparks fears of curbs on press freedom (Sankalp Phartiyal)

• Voice of America: Media Freedom in Slovenia Under EU Scrutiny (Marja Novak)

Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Like what you read and want to support me? Consider donating via a paid subscription here. I’ll see you next Tuesday! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.

This is the 67th issue of Pressing and it’s great to have you with me. Please send me feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and tips at sgnover@gmail.com.

A Journalist Goes on Trial in Des Moines

Andrea Sahouri occupies one line in my spreadsheet. She’s entry #58 of 306. “Arrested and pepper sprayed after identifying herself as press,” I noted quickly, linking to a USA Today story about her detention in Des Moines, IA.

From the comfort of my parents’ home in South Jersey, I compiled a list of press freedom abuses—for lack of a better term—perpetrated during the George Floyd protests, which swept across the country this summer. I wasn’t out in the streets, covering the boiling anger of Black Americans and their allies, but I used my perch to watch those who were.

When protests erupt in America, we see a glimpse into what other countries experience daily: It’s not safe to be a journalist. When you’re reporting from a protest, there’s often little distinguishing a professional journalist from a protester. Some would argue that’s a good thing. Journalists and protesters are exercising different First Amendment rights, but the former group is also seen as an extension of the public. I see the difference as microcosmic of a larger problem: If the police are subjecting journalists to rubber bullets, batons and arrests, then imagine what those without press credentials are experiencing.

Here’s what I knew about Sahouri at the time, according to the USA Today report:

Late Sunday, Des Moines police arrested reporter Andrea Sahouri, of the Des Moines Register, part of the USA TODAY Network, for failure to disperse while she was covering the George Floyd demonstration at a local mall that turned violent.

In a video apparently recorded in a police transport vehicle while still at the Merle Hay Mall and then posted on Twitter, Sahouri said police sprayed her in the face with pepper spray after she identified herself as a member of the media. "I'm press. I'm press. I'm press," she said she told police. 

KCCI earlier showed Sahouri sitting on a curb with her hands zip tied behind her back. It appeared she was wailing in pain from the pepper spray. 

Another reporter who was with her at the event was not arrested but shared the same account with editors before Sahouri posted her video on Twitter.

Sahouri was released hours later and charged with failure to disperse and interference with official acts.

One distinction between the public and the press often comes through carveouts for press to stay in a location after curfews or other administrative orders. Sahouri was not wearing press credentials when she was arrested for “failure to disperse” but she repeatedly identified herself as press, she says.

Bewilderingly, assistant Polk County attorney Bradley Kinkade argued in court that Sahouri’s press status is “irrelevant to her charges.”

Readers of this newsletter: I don’t need to tell you why these charges are problematic. News-gathering is an essential part of journalism. Journalists need to be free to report on public gatherings and government power.

“Journalists cover protests to serve as the eyes and ears of the public, to ensure free speech and assembly rights are upheld and to seek out the truth of what unfolds, whether a protest is peaceful or violent and whether law enforcement’s response is viewed as proportional or excessive,” the Des Moines Register’s editorial board wrote two weeks ago. “When reporters are arrested, assaulted or otherwise prevented from doing their jobs, it’s not an attack on just a single journalist or a media company. It’s an attack on everyone's rights to be informed and to hold those in power accountable for their actions.”

For me, it’s the indifference. The prosecutors in this case do not care that a journalist was arrested for doing her job. That is one of the most troubling things of all.

READ MORE:

• CJR: They were arrested while covering protests last year. They’re still in legal limbo. (Jon Allsop)

• Des Moines Register: Recap: Day one of Register reporter Andrea Sahouri trial sees DMPD officers testifying on response to Merle Hay protests. (William Morris)

• NPR: Iowa Reporter Goes On Trial In Case That Raises Press Freedom Concerns (Scott Neuman)

• USA Today: In 'exceedingly rare' case, Iowa journalist faces charges from reporting on summer protests (Ryan W. Miller)

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The Louisville Courier Journal ceased printing locally last week, as owners Gannett consolidated its printing operation to a hub in Indianapolis, IN.

More Trouble in Myanmar

Associated Press photojournalist Thein Zaw was arrested on Feb. 27 while covering a protest of the recent military coup in Myanmar. Five other journalists—one freelancer and staffers at the outlets Myanmar Now, Myanmar Photo Agency, 7Day News and Zee Kwet—have also been arrested and charged with violating a “public order law.”

Does this sound familiar? Amid the Rohingya genocide in the country, two Reuters reporters, U Wa Lone and U Kyaw Soe, were arrested and sentenced under a government secrets statute in 2017. The two weren’t released until 2019.

But the current charges sound even more similar to Andrea Sahouri’s circumstance in Iowa.

As we’ve discussed, the accumulation of government power is intricately linked with stifling speech and journalism. That’s true in Myanmar and that’s true in America.

In the Headlines:

• CJR: Five big findings from the Journalism Crisis Project (Lauren Harris)

• CPJ: Brazilian journalist Patrícia Campos Mello sued President Bolsonaro’s son for moral damages – and won (Renata Neder)

• The Daily Beast: Teen Vogue Staff Rail Against New Editor-in-Chief’s Past Tweets Mocking Asians (Maxwell Tani)

• The Daily Beast: These Alt-Weeklies Faced ‘Total Annihilation.’ Here’s How They Survived. (Sophia June)

• Foreign Policy: The First Draft of History—Why the decline of foreign reporting makes for worse foreign policy. (Janine di Giovanni)

• NPR: Trump Appointee At VOA Parent Paid Law Firm Millions To Investigate His Own Staff (David Folkenflik)

• Reuters: 'I will shoot whoever I see': Myanmar soldiers use TikTok to threaten protesters (Staff)

• The Washington Post: He told the world about his brutal torture in Syria. Then, mysteriously, he went back. (Liz Sly)

• The Washington Post: No one in the Philippines would air a documentary about press freedom. So Frontline is doing it itself. (Elahe Izadi)

Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Like what you read and want to support me? Consider donating via a paid subscription here. I’ll see you next Tuesday! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.

This is the 66th issue of Pressing and it’s great to have you with me. Please send me feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and tips at sgnover@gmail.com.

No Justice for Jamal

What is there to say about the disappointment of the week? What is there to say about Joe Biden, president of “c’mon man,” who campaigned on an anti-malarkey platform, would completely balk on holding the Saudi crown prince accountable for ordering the gruesome dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident journalist residing in exile in Northern Virginia in the last year of his life? The whole ordeal reeks of putrid malarkey.

What is there to say about a broken campaign promise? Joe Biden said he would make the murderous fiend “pay the price” if elected president.

What is there to say about what we already knew? U.S. intelligence agencies, once again, found the Saudi heir guilty of prescribing an extrajudicial bone saw killing for one of our own. And that these conclusions supported a 2019 UN report and a 2018 CIA report.

What is there to say that Trump, who openly stated that the relationship with Saudi Arabia was more important than justice for Jamal, at least imposed sanctions against 17 members of the hit team? Scores of Saudis were sanctioned, but not MbS himself?

What is there to say that the director of national intelligence’s office took down the original version of its report on Friday and replaced it with a version that omitted three names of people responsible?

Jamal Khashoggi’s death was a tragedy of spectacular proportions, a comic book killing of a larger-than-life figure. Donald Trump failed in responding because he did not care. Joe Biden failed too. I doubt it’s because he does not care. But he clearly lacked the imagination necessary to see an American foreign policy that shunned Saudi interests.

What is there to say that Trump bragged that he “saved his ass,” referring to MbS, but Biden did so without bragging about it?

CNN’s Jake Tapper put it best:

"Is the only difference between Trump bragging about saving MBS' ass, and Biden acting as if he has no choice but to save MBS' ass... Is the only difference the words surrounding the decision? Either way, the ass of the man who ordered the barbaric slaughter of an American-based journalist has been saved."

What is there to say?

The Knight Institute’s Jameel Jaffer and the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Joel Simon have suggestions for the U.S. government’s next steps, as published in Slate. Forgive me for stripping this article, which you should read, for parts:

• First, the Biden administration should disclose other key documents relating to Khashoggi’s murder. 

• Second, the administration should ban the crown prince from the United States under laws including the Global Magnitsky Act, which authorizes the president to deny entry to, and block the assets of, foreign nationals determined to be “responsible for extrajudicial killings, torture, or other gross violations of internationally recognizes human rights.”

• Third, given the personal responsibility of the crown prince for the crime, the administration should extend and expand the freeze it has already instituted on arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

• Fourth, Congress should hold hearings to consider what legal reforms are necessary to ensure that American courts can hold accountable those who persecute U.S.-based journalists and human rights activists.

• Finally, American civic and business leaders must do their part [to isolate Saudi Arabia].

I have read too many moving articles about this affair in the past few days. Here’s my recommended reading list:

• The Atlantic: Murderers Should Be Called Murderers (Graeme Wood)

• CNN: Three names mysteriously removed from Khashoggi intelligence report after initial publication (Alex Marquardt)

• Columbia Journalism Review: Press freedom comes second to self-interest—again—as Biden lets MBS off the hook (Jon Allsop)

• The New York Times: President Biden Lets a Saudi Murderer Walk (Nicholas Kristof)

• Slate: How America Can Deliver Justice for Jamal Khashoggi (Jameel Jaffer and Joel Simon)

• The Washington Post: Say it ain’t so, Joe (Fred Ryan)

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In Other News:

• National Review: White House Declines to Release Virtual Visitor Logs (Zachary Evans)

• NBC News THINK: Dominion's MyPillow and Smartmatic's Fox News election suits put 'disinformation' on trial (Jonathan Peters)

• The New York Times: How One State Managed to Actually Write Rules on Facial Recognition (Kashmir Hill)

• U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Arrested for covering protests, four journalists are due in court this month (Kirstin McCudden)

• The Washington Post: Marty Baron, Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump and the eight years that reshaped The Washington Post — and journalism (Sarah Ellison)

• The Washington Post: White House and press are at odds over plan to charge reporters for coronavirus testing (Paul Farhi)

• Wired: Facebook's Oversight Board Must Uphold the Ban on Trump (Daniel Kreiss and Shannon McGregor)

Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Like what you read and want to support me? Consider donating via a paid subscription here. I’ll see you next Tuesday! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.

This is the 65th issue of Pressing and it’s great to have you with me. Please send me feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and tips at sgnover@gmail.com.

T.J. Ducklo Ducks Out

Last week, a top White House spokesperson threatened a female reporter for Politico and, as a result, lost his job.

The whole ordeal came out of an odd political reporter-political official relationship between Axios’ Alexi McCammond and White House deputy press secretary TJ Ducklo. I am morbidly uninterested in their relationship, though let’s note there’s an ethical morass the two—and their respective organizations—should steer clear of.

You can read the version the couple wanted the public to know in People, published just before Ducklo went rogue:

• People: Reporter Forgoes Covering President as Romance Blossoms with Biden Aide Battling Cancer: ‘Didn’t Think Twice’ (Adam Carlson)

But Politico reporters, writing for its flagship newsletter Playbook, were also pursuing the story. After Tara Palmeri contacted McCammond for comment, Ducklo spun around and phoned Palmeri and berated her with language that I won’t fully re-print. “I will destroy you,” was the clean part.

• Vanity Fair: “I Will Destroy You”: Biden Aide Threatened a Politico Reporter Pursuing a Story on his Relationship.” (Caleb Ecarma)

Well, the whole thing naturally leaked to Vanity Fair and the rest goes like this: The White House suspended Ducklo for one week and made him apologize. (For what it’s worth, he sent Palmeri a meager apology.) But the press corps wasn’t happy. Biden had just recently promised that he would fire any staffer “on the spot” if they were found being disrespectful—this seemed like a promise broken just a month into the job. Ducklo resigned the next day.

I have some thoughts (many of which I have tweeted):

• Don’t threaten journalists.

• Don’t threaten anyone.

• Don’t sexually harass journalists.

• Don’t sexually harass anyone.

• I’ve read too many stories of female reporters being harassed at work recently.

• Threats are not off-the-record.

• Biden's first PR crisis is because of his own PR staff.

• It’s the job of spokespeople to work with journalists. If they cannot be respectful, they shouldn’t have that job—especially in the White House.

• Politics may feel like a game, but it’s not. Journalists are at work and we’re all just doing a job. No one should be subject to abuse or harassment at work.

• If the Biden administration wants to show that it's on higher ground than the "enemy of the people" White House that preceded it, it needs to have a zero-tolerance policy on issues like this. Ducklo should’ve been dismissed immediately.

• The United States sets an example for the world. If Biden wants to be a champion of the press around the world, he needs to start in his own briefing room.

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Biden Wants Julian Assange

Biden administration wants Julian Assange extradited to the United States, to the dismay of press freedom and human rights advocates. The Justice Department, soon to be helmed by Merrick Garland, is continuing in lock-step from the Trump administration, which has been prosecuting Assange, the Wikileaks founder, under Espionage Act and computer hacking charges.

As I recently wrote about in this newsletter, a British court denied a U.S. request for Assange’s extradition in January, not because of threats to press freedom but because of the state of the U.S. prison system and Assange’s own mental health. Last week, Biden’s DOJ appealed that ruling.

In response, 24 human right and press freedom groups wrote a letter to Biden’s acting attorney general, Monty Wilkinson, urging him to cease the prosecution and attempted extradition of Assange, which they call a “grave threat to press freedom both in the United States and abroad.” The coalition, which includes the ACLU, the Committee to Protect Journalists and many others, writes:

The indictment of Mr. Assange threatens press freedom because much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely—and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do. Journalists at major news publications regularly speak with sources, ask for clarification or more documentation, and receive and publish documents the government considers secret. In our view, such a precedent in this case could effectively criminalize these common journalistic practices.

These Espionage Act charges revolve fairly standard journalistic practices: In 2010, Wikileaks published leaked military materials provided by Chelsea Manning (“not his later publication of Democratic Party emails hacked by Russia during the 2016 election,” the Times caveats.) Separately, the single charge for computer hacking conspiracy has been described as legally shaky since it rests on Assange promising to help Manning crack a password, though that is certainly not acceptable or standard journalistic practice. (The lawyer Tor Ekeland describes the legal intricacies well in this 2019 Wired piece.)

The letter is framed in a way that would surely turn Biden’s stomach.

The Trump administration positioned itself as an antagonist to the institution of a free and unfettered press in numerous ways. Its abuse of its prosecutorial powers was among the most disturbing. We are deeply concerned about the way that a precedent created by prosecuting Assange could be leveraged—perhaps by a future administration—against publishers and journalists of all stripes. Major news organizations share this concern, which is why the announcement of charges against Assange in May 2019 was met with vociferous and nearly universal condemnation from virtually every major American news outlet, even though many of those news outlets have criticized Mr. Assange in the past.

It’s worth reading the list of signatories in full: Access Now, American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International - USA, Center for Constitutional Rights, Committee to Protect Journalists, Defending Rights and Dissent, Demand Progress, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, First Amendment Coalition, Free Press, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Index on Censorship, Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, National Coalition Against Censorship, Open The Government, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, PEN America, Project on Government Oversight, Reporters Without Borders, Roots Action, The Press Freedom Defense Fund of First Look Institute, Whistleblower & Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) at ExposeFacts.

It’s hard to get 24 organizations to agree on anything these days.

Reporters Without Borders’ Rebecca Vincent told The Times simply: “This marks a major missed opportunity for President Biden to distance himself from the Trump administration’s terrible record on press freedom.”

In the U.S.

• The Irish Times: Donie O’Sullivan: ‘The chaos I’ve had in my mind is more terrifying than the riot at the Capitol’ (Simon Carswell)

• The New Orleans Advocate: Attorney General Jeff Landry sues Advocate reporter over public-records request (Gordon Russell)

• The New Republic: The Capitol Riot Killed “Both Sides” Journalism (Meredith Shiner)

• The New Yorker: Inside the Making of Facebook’s Supreme Court (Kate Klonick)

• Recode: You’ve been invited to Clubhouse. Your privacy hasn’t. (Sara Morrison)

• Voice of America: US Lawmakers Introduce Bills to Strengthen Press Freedom Worldwide

Around the World

• BuzzFeed News: Meghan Markle Has Won A Lawsuit Against The Mail On Sunday After It Published A Private Letter She Sent To Her Father (Ellie Hall)

• CJR: Swe Win on journalism in Myanmar, the coup, and what comes next (E. Tammy Kim)

• CPJ: Al-Jazeera’s Ghada Oueiss on hacking, harassment, and Jamal Khashoggi (Justin Shilad)

• CNN: BBC News banned in China, one week after CGTN's license withdrawn in the UK (Philip Wang and Jonny Hallam)

• Financial Times: Hungary media freedom fears mount as broadcaster goes off air (Valerie Hopkins)

• NBC News: Loujain al-Hathloul, Saudi women's rights activist, released from prison (Saphora Smith)

• Reuters: Polish court orders historians to apologise over Holocaust book (Alan Charlish and Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk)

• South China Morning Post: Australian journalist Cheng Lei’s arrest in China causes concern, press freedom fears (John Power)

Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Like what you read and want to support me? Consider donating via a paid subscription here. I’ll see you next Tuesday! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.

This is the 64th issue of Pressing and it’s great to have you with me. Please send me feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and tips at sgnover@gmail.com.

Questions Linger after Donald Trump’s De-Platforming

Thanks for waiting! It’s been a few weeks since l last sent out a newsletter. I write about social media in my day job so I’ve been kept busy by Trump’s de-platforming, the Reddit-Wall Street saga and more.

Recently, some really important decisions happened concerning speech on the web. These are all decisions made by private companies who have the legal right to moderate their platforms as they see fit. Let’s recap:

• In the fallout from the Jan. 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol, nearly every major social media platform banned then-president Donald Trump. Twitter and Snapchat gave him the permanent boot, Facebook left his fate up to the pseudo-independent Oversight Board, and YouTube left the door open for a possible return.

• Apple and Google booted Parler, a far-right social media platform, out of their app marketplaces for failing to properly moderate violent threats on its platform. Amazon Web Services severed its relationship with Parler for the same reasons, temporarily forcing the platform offline.

• And Stripe and Shopify both severed ties with the Trump campaign’s online stores. And tons of companies stopped donating to politicians that voted against certifying the free and fair election results.

My take: In 2021, one of the major themes of my coverage will be the limits of content moderation. Which companies make decisions about political speech and which do not? I am working on a piece about this for Adweek, so I won’t give away all of it right now, but notice as we move further and further away from social media companies making decisions about online speech to companies that make up the “infrastructure” of the web: App marketplaces, web hosts, financial services companies and—if we dare entertain the thought—internet service providers. I think it’s important for companies to engage in their own constitutionally protected speech and associate with whatever people and companies they want, but we also need to consider the long-term effects of an internet that’s full of powerful decision-makers ordering what’s acceptable speech and what’s not.

I have no pity for Trump or his campaign and little sympathy for Parler (see my piece titled “Don’t Weep for Parler.”), but I am interested in market competition in this arena. Consider the above examples of companies cracking down on Trump and pro-Trump media. Facebook is being sued by the government for having a monopoly on social media, Google and Apple control closed environments for their app stores on Android and iOS devices respectively, and Amazon Web Services controls more than 30% of the cloud market.

For me, these questions about speech are not about whether Facebook should host Trump or even whether Amazon should host Parler. They’re more so about competition.

Do the banished have alternatives in the free market? Can a user find another social media platform if one bans them? Can a website find a new web host if one doesn’t want to host it? If an app can’t be downloaded from an app store, how can it survive?

I am mostly concerned about Amazon, Apple and Google banishing Parler because monopolists seem to be controlling important segments of speech online. Stripe and Shopify also ceased doing business with Trump and while they aren’t as dominant as, say, Visa and Mastercard, the two big credit card companies engage in similar practices from time to time. Recently, Visa and Mastercard both cut off access to PornHub following a New York Times piece about sex trafficking content on the adult website.

The two big questions here are 1.) Who should make decisions about content moderation online and 2.) Is there enough competition in these markets where those harmed can find alternatives?

What do you think about Trump’s de-platforming? Disagree with me about who should make these important decisions? As long as you don’t tell me that Twitter is violating someone’s First Amendment rights or that repealing Section 230 reform will fix all of these problems, I want to hear from you! Reply to this email and let me know your thoughts.

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Will Austin Tice Be a Priority for the Biden Administration?

The Trump administration was not shy about its commitment to bringing home journalist Austin Tice who is believed to be alive and imprisoned in Syria. In a November essay in this newsletter, I praised the former administration’s stated commitment to the cause and hoped that Biden would continue to make Tice’s recovery a priority—even if it meant breaking with established norms for how we communicate with oppressive regimes.

Today, a reporter asked the Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby about Tice but he declined to discuss the matter.

In a recent column, Jason Rezaian urged Biden to retain one Trump appointee: Roger Carstens, the special envoy for hostage affairs.

Even though it would mean extending the tenure of a Trump political appointee, Biden should keep current Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens on board. Doing so would send a powerful message to the families of Americans currently being held abroad and their captors that the U.S. government is always committed to the safe return of Americans wrongfully or arbitrarily detained.

According to the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, Rezaian notes, 43 Americans including Tice are being held hostage abroad. It’s still unclear how exactly Biden will approach the tough task of bringing them home.

MORE ON THIS:

• USA Today: Bring my journalist brother home by Thanksgiving (Jacob Tice)

Tech Headlines

• AP: Australian prime minister says Bing could replace Google (Rod McGuirk)

• BuzzFeed News: Twitter Unblocked Accounts That Criticized India’s Government. Now, Its Employees Are Being Threatened With Jail Time Unless It Blocks Them Again. (Pranav Dixit)

• BuzzFeed News: After Fueling A Genocide, Facebook Is Taking A Stand Against A Myanmar Coup (Tasneem Nashrulla and Ryan Mac)

• CNBC: Robinhood sued by family of 20-year-old trader who killed himself after believing he racked up huge losses (Maggie Fitzgerald)

• The New York Times: Everything’s a Joke Until It’s Not (John Herrman)

• The New York Times: In China, an App Offered Space for Debate. Then the Censors Came. (Amy Chang Chien and Amy Qin)

• The Wall Street Journal: Pakistan’s Supreme Court Orders Release of Man Convicted in Killing of WSJ Reporter Daniel Pearl (Saeed Shah)

• The Verge: Clearview’s facial recognition tech is illegal mass surveillance, Canada privacy commissioners say (Kim Lyons)

On Media

• Axios: The American Spectator sues The Spectator for trademark infringement (Sara Fischer)

• Bloomberg Law: OAN to Pay MSNBC $250,000 in Fees After Losing Maddow Libel Suit (Peter Hayes)

• Courthouse News: Voice of America Faces Class Action Over Employment Practices (Samantha Hawkins)

• CPJ: Egyptian cartoonist Ashraf Hamdi detained after publishing video on Arab Spring anniversary

• CPJ: Egyptian journalists Hamdi al-Zaeem and Ahmed Khalifa detained on false news and terrorism charges

• The Los Angeles Times: Fox News cancels Lou Dobbs’ show; pro-Trump host not expected to be back on air (Stephen Battaglio)

• The New Yorker: When Reporting Becomes a Defense for Rioting (Andrew Marantz)

• Washingtonian: Punchbowl News, the Tipsheets Founded by Three Politico Alums, Is Sued for Trademark Infringement (Andrew Beaujon)

Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Like what you read and want to support me? Consider donating via a paid subscription here. I’ll see you next Tuesday! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.

This is the 63rd issue of Pressing and it’s great to have you with me. Please send me feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and tips at sgnover@gmail.com.

A Letter From Washington

Logan Circle borders the bustle of 14th Street and the hustle of downtown, but it’s a quiet neighborhood. But on Monday afternoon, something was different. What startled me wasn’t anything I heard, rather what I saw: uniformed troops standing around in the park.

About 25 of them were just standing around, not bothering anyone, but they didn’t fit there. Not next to the dog-walkers, the picnickers, the readers, the guys with the boombox, the coffee drinkers, the chatters and the other characters that frequent that park.

It’s troubling, albeit fitting, that this chaotic presidency ends with an enormous military presence in Washington, D.C. For what it’s worth, Military Times reported that there will be twice as many American troops in D.C. as there are currently deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

The president who mocked fallen soldiers as “losers” and “suckers” will be seen out by a military force of incredible size. Trump always wanted a military parade. This is what he gets instead. There’s a cruel poetry in this ending.

It’s the end of an era in Washington, D.C. We can only pray that the transition of power is peaceful, that no one else dies from the insurrection that Trump has egged on by refusing to accept the results of the election. We can only hope that the far-right, rabble-rousing, insurrectionist, white nationalist, live-streaming and QAnon-adhering factions of Trump’s support stay home.

I miss the way Washington’s federal district used to look. I miss the years before Trump when you could walk up to the White House gates, when there wasn’t a giant fence, when streets weren’t blocked off, when you could safely attend an inauguration, when you didn’t have to fear rogue out-out-towners storming the Capitol Building, a sacred place for our country but also a place where your friends and colleagues work.

I miss those days. I hope we can return to something like that.

The next president won’t be perfect. As journalists, it’s not our job to cheerlead for Joe Biden or any politician. But I hope that he will be respectful of the things that truly make America great: Our democracy, our institutions, the Fourth Estate, our freedoms. I hope he protects whistleblowers, fights for hostages, protects immigrants, looks after the poor and the needy and those among us who are marginalized. This one did not.

Be safe this week.

If you would like to donate to keep Pressing going, you may do so through a “paid subscription” below. Pressing is a free newsletter, but any contributions allow me to keep producing this newsletter for everyone each week.

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Five Years Free

Jason Rezaian has been free for five years. The Washington Post Tehran bureau chief, who is now a columnist for the newspaper, left Iran’s Evin Prison five years ago as part of a diplomatic operation engineered by the Obama administration. Jason and his wife Yegi, who was also imprisoned, were held in prison for the simple crime of doing journalism.

We, as journalists and as Americans, are lucky to have them home safe. Congratulations, Jason and Yegi.

• Order Jason’s book Prisoner. It’s incredible.

• And read my Atlantic interview with him about the book.

• Read Jason’s Twitter thread from this weekend, marking the occasion.

Donald Trump Lost Some of His Platforms. He Isn’t Being Censored.

I am getting fairly sick of hearing that Donald Trump is being censored. I cover social media companies for Adweek and, while I’ve only been on the beat and in this job for a year, I have watched these companies for a long time.

For many years, social media companies resisted calling themselves media companies. They were technology companies and, after all, technology companies don’t make editorial decisions, they claimed. That was and still is incorrect. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and any other platform that hosts user-generated content, makes decisions based on what they feel is acceptable. There are a few factors in what makes something acceptable speech on a platform: Is it legal to host this content? Does it follow the site rules that they have established? Is it from a politician or someone else whose views may be newsworthy? Is this something advertisers would want their ads running against or near?

These are some of the many considerations that social media companies consider when approaching user-generated content on their platforms. For years, a chorus of voices, including academics, activists, journalists and some politicians have pointed out consistently that these companies don’t do enough to police their platforms. How often have you heard that Facebook or Twitter host extremist activity, conspiracy theories, anti-vax misinformation, foreign influence operations, or something else alarming? That has certainly been the case over the years.

But, as I have documented in my reporting, 2020 was a different year. With the pandemic raging, the Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the country and a contentious election looming, the social platforms did more in 2020 to crack down on misinformation and hate speech than they previously did. That meant new rules, but also new enforcement.

Fast forward to January. The presidents words—and his lack thereof—as the Capitol was being ransacked by pro-Trump thugs, triggered the platforms to take concrete action. Eventually every major platform determined that Trump was inciting violence, removed his posts, and suspended him. He’s currently suspended from Facebook, YouTube and Twitch until further notice and he’s permanently banned from Twitter and Snapchat.

It’s important, I feel, to view these decisions as corporate speech. When a private company kicks a politician off its service, that’s not censorship—that’s protected speech. Censorship is the opposite. It’s when a government stops a private company or individual from speaking or orders them to host government speech. “Congress shall make no law…” the First Amendment reads, not “Twitter shall make no law…”

If you feel deeply uncomfortable with Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg making decisions that impact large swaths of speech on the internet, then that’s a competition problem, not a speech problem. Trust me, I share that concern. For what it’s worth, the government is suing Facebook for having a monopoly on social media.

This logic extends to the Parler debate, which I won’t get into too much. But I’m not too concerned with Apple or Google kicking off Parler for having terrible moderation policies—I’m concerned that Apple and Google control closed app ecosystems important for the modern internet. I’m not mad that Amazon kicked off Parler, but perhaps they own too much of the Web hosting and cloud market. The same logic applies to Josh Hawley, who just found a new publisher for his book, despite claiming Simon & Schuster was “censoring” him.

Companies, who have protected speech rights, must be able to make decisions about what is acceptable speech on their platforms free from government interference.

And as for Donald Trump? He’ll be fine. Chances are, he’ll be let back onto Facebook and YouTube. But even if not, he can always find an audience. Get on Reddit or TikTok or Vimeo or Clubhouse or some other platform he hasn’t tried yet. Call into Hannity, talk to reporters, give a speech—I bet cameras will show up.

On Fox News the other day, Trump spokesman Hogan Gidley claimed that Trump could not denounce the Capitol attack more because he doesn’t have a platform. His spokesman said that on Fox News. Think about that one.

• Catch me on SiriusXM’s Wharton Business/Marketing Matters on Wednesday talking about this exact topic. 5-6 PM Eastern on SiriusXM 132.

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Media Law

• Axios: Dominion sends cease and desist letter to My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell (Ursula Perano)

• CJR: Indefinite silence: How SAMs imperil press freedom (Aviva Stahl)

• CNN: Wikileaks asks reporters for help in desperate bid to score Julian Assange last-minute pardon (Oliver Darcy)

• The New York Times: Fox Settled a Lawsuit Over Its Lies. But It Insisted on One Unusual Condition. (Ben Smith)

• NPR: Voice Of America White House Reporter Reassigned After Questioning Pompeo (David Folkenflik)

• The Washington Post: Voice of America journalists demand resignation of news agency’s top leadership (Paul Farhi)

• The Washington Post: Laura Poitras says she’s been fired by First Look Media over Reality Winner controversy. Now she’s questioning the company’s integrity. (Sarah Ellison)

Trouble in Washington

• AP: Journalists prepare for protests where they could be targets (David Bauder)

• Business Insider: 2 men who posed with 'murder the media' scrawled on a Capitol door say they were just there to report for their outlet, Murder the Media (Mia Jankowicz)

• The Hill: Journalist accounts, footage suggest they were targeted in Capitol riot (Jordan Williams)

• The New York Times: Covering Pro-Trump Mobs, the News Media Became a Target (Tiffany Hsu and Katie Robertson)

• RCFP: Reporters Committee legal hotline available for inauguration coverage

Around the World

• AP: Kremlin critic Navalny detained after landing in Moscow (Mstyslav Chernov and Jim Heintz)

• CPJ: Turkish police raid Etkin News Agency, arrest reporter Pınar Gayıp

• Middle East Eye: Turkey will not deport journalist Mohammad Mosaed to Iran, sources say (Ragip Soylu)

On the Web

• CPJ: Section 230 reform could have unintended consequences for the press (Madeline Earp)

• The New York Times: As Trump Clashes With Big Tech, China’s Censored Internet Takes His Side (Li Yuan)

• The New York Times: After Barring Trump, Facebook and Twitter Face Scrutiny About Inaction Abroad (Adam Satariano)

• Quartz: Social media gave a voice to democracy in Uganda so the government shut it down—again (Geoffrey Ssenoga)

Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Like what you read and want to support me? Consider donating via a paid subscription here. I’ll see you next Tuesday! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.

This is the 62nd issue of Pressing and it’s great to have you with me. Please send me feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and tips at sgnover@gmail.com.

Assange Extradition Denied—But Not Because of Press Freedom Threat

The new year started with a long-awaited verdict with real implications for press freedom in the United States and around the world. A British judge ruled Monday that Wikileaks founder and publisher Julian Assange will not be extradited to the U.S., where he faces charges of violating the Espionage Act as well as conspiracy to hack government computers.

However, the press freedom and human rights communities, concerned about threats to those seeking to publish government secrets, were pleased with the decision but disappointed with the rationale.

The judge said that Assange was at risk of suicide if placed in the U.S. prison system. While that’s certainly a valid concern, she affirmed that the American government was operating in “good faith” in its prosecution of Assange.

“We are immensely relieved that Julian Assange will not be extradited to the U.S.,” Rebecca Vincent, director of international campaigns for Reporters Without Borders, said in a statement. “At the same time, we are extremely disappointed that the court failed to take a stand for press freedom and journalistic protections, and we disagree with the judge’s assessment that the case was not politically motivated and was not centered on journalism and free speech. This decision leaves the door open for further similar prosecutions and will have a chilling effect on national security reporting around the world if the root issues are not addressed.”

The Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Trevor Timm tweeted that it’s “hard to call this a true victory for press freedom, given the judge’s disregard for journalists’ rights” but it’s a “huge sigh of relief.”

“If the U.S. can't prosecute Assange, it means there won't [be] precedent criminalizing newsgathering,” he added. “And that's a very good thing.”

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, tweeted that the decision would “cast a shadow over investigative journalism,” specifically that, “merely by publishing classified secrets,” Assange violated the Espionage Act.

The chorus of voices from the press freedom community was clear. No matter what you think of Assange or his organization, the implications for the First Amendment, should he have been extradited and charged, would be dire. And it’s not exactly over yet—the U.S. government plans to appeal in the next two weeks.

READ MORE:

• BBC: Julian Assange: UK judge blocks extradition of Wikileaks founder to US

• RSF: UK court blocks US attempt to extradite Julian Assange, but leaves public interest reporting at risk

• CJR: Assange, and the critical threat to publishing state secrets

• The New York Times: U.K. Judge Blocks Assange’s Extradition to U.S., Citing Mental Health (Elian Peltier and Megan Specia)

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In the News:

• Al Jazeera: Citizen journalist jailed for 4 years over Wuhan virus reporting

• AP: Moroccan journalist appears before judge on espionage charge

• CPJ: Moroccan authorities arrest journalist Maati Monjib

• The Guardian: Turkey sentences journalist Can Dündar to 27 years in jail (Bethan McKernan)

• The Guardian: Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancee urges Joe Biden to release CIA report (Stephanie Kirchgaessner)

• The Intercept: Hiding Covid-19: How the Trump Administration Suppresses Photography of the Pandemic (Peter Maass)

• Law & Crime: Judge Throws Potential Wrench into Sarah Palin’s Suit Against the New York Times, Finds Anti-SLAPP Law Can Be Applied (Adam Klasfeld)

• The New York Times: An Oscar Winner Made a Khashoggi Documentary. Streaming Services Didn’t Want It. (Nicole Sperling)

• The New York Times: The ‘Red Slime’ Lawsuit That Could Sink Right-Wing Media (Ben Smith)

• NBC News: Former Rep. Katie Hill sues ex-husband, Daily Mail, Redstate.com over 'nonconsensual porn' (Andrew Blankstein)

• NPR: Biden's Incoming Press Secretary: Briefings Won't Be A Platform For Right-Wing Spin (Steve Inskeep)

• NPR: Trump Appointee Seeks Lasting Control Over Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia (David Folkenflik)

• Reuters: Ethiopian police arrest Reuters cameraman

• Voice of America: Journalism Collective Finds Safety in Collaboration (Graham Vyse)

• The Washington Post: Trump appointee names conservative allies to run Radio Free Europe and Cuba broadcast agency (Paul Farhi)

• The Washington Post: Targeted killings of journalists are on the rise across Afghanistan (Sharif Hassan)

• The Washington Post: Trump administration weighing legal immunity for Saudi crown prince in alleged assassination plot (Spencer S. Hsu and Kareem Fahim)

The Opinion Pages:

• CNN: Just let journalists do our jobs (Nima Elbagir)

• The Washington Post: How Biden can undo damage to U.S.-backed news outlets that counter authoritarian propaganda (Jamie Fly)

• The Washington Post: Biden’s promises to give Jamal Khashoggi justice will be tested soon (Josh Rogin)

Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Like what you read and want to support me? Consider donating via a paid subscription here. I’ll see you next Tuesday! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.

This is the 61st issue of Pressing and it’s great to have you with me. Please send me feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and tips at sgnover@gmail.com.

Voice of America’s Frightening New Boss

Voice of America, the editorially-independent-but-state-run media outlet, has been under assault all year. Since this newsletter has closely followed the Trumpification of VOA, I don’t think I need to rehash all that’s happened. (You can read about the most recent episode here).

But, as Trump’s tenure is coming to a close, there was a troubling new development: While a judge recently blocked conservative filmmaker and U.S. Agency of Global Media head Michael Pack, from breaching VOA’s editorial firewall, Pack seemingly found a workaround.

• NPR: Trump Appointee Unconstitutionally Interfered With VOA, Judge Rules (David Folkenflik)

Last week, Pack pushed out VOA’s interim director and appointed Robert Reilly as the new VOA director, which happens to be an editorial position.

• The Washington Post: Voice of America interim director pushed out by Trump-appointed overseer in final flurry of actions to assert control (Paul Farhi)

Reilly, a onetime VOA director is also an ideological extremist and bigot. He’s the author of the brazenly homophobic book “Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything” and the Islamophobic tome “The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis.” Not only has the firewall been breached, but Trumpism has found a way to infiltrate one of America’s best foreign policy tools.

• The Atlantic: The Voice of America Will Sound Like Trump (Anne Applebaum)

Former VOA director Amanda Bennett, who resigned in June after Pack’s appointment, wrote a damning op-ed in The Washington Post about her successor this week.

“Expecting to be fired, I resigned as VOA director in June. Normally, I never would — and never have in previous positions — spoken out against my successor. A new administration has the right to a new director, even one with whom I might disagree.

But this is not normal. Reilly is a dangerous choice. His views are not conservative — they are extreme. As head of one of America’s most powerful voices to the world, he risks causing reputational damage that will be hard to repair.”

She then brought up his book and asked a harrowing question:

“Imagine how Reilly’s views will be greeted by governments in countries that ostracize or even murder gays.”

On his Islamophobia, she said:

“Reilly has every right to hold and even promulgate such views — just not at the head of America’s news organization.”

Joe Biden has pledged to replace Michael Pack when he takes office in January, but there might be additional challenges in removing Reilly. A new amendment in the defense spending bill, the NDAA, requires the USAGM chief to get the approval of a not-yet-established board in order to remove the VOA director.

Writing in The Washington Post, media columnist Margaret Sullivan cast some skepticism that bolstering the USAGM will be a top priority for Joe Biden when he assumes office.

President-elect Joe Biden has indicated that he’ll replace Pack… But will repairing VOA and its sibling organizations really be a top priority for the Biden administration? Given the range of problems Biden is inheriting, that’s hard to imagine. And the broken pieces won’t be so easy to put back together, given everything that’s gone on.”

One of the most impressive signs that VOA has thus far resisted its rightward lurch is that it is still steadfastly covering its own scandal. And it’s not censoring any of the unsavory details about its new director.

Perhaps, that’s how we’ll know when the whole thing’s gone bad. Pay attention to how VOA covers itself, which will surely be in the news for months to come.

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BuzzFeed Beats Back ICE

Earlier this month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), issued a subpoena to try to get BuzzFeed News to divulge one of its sources. BuzzFeed turned around and reported the extraordinary step as news:

• BuzzFeed News: The Trump Administration Is Trying To Force BuzzFeed News To Divulge Its Sources With A Subpoena (Hamed Aleaziz)

"BuzzFeed News emphatically rejects any requests for information about possible sources and methods of our reporting,” BuzzFeed’s top editor Mark Schoofs said in a statement. “We do not confirm or discuss confidential sources, and this subpoena is an outrageous overreach by the federal government. It's fundamentally at odds with the US Constitution and will not have any impact on our journalism." CPJ called the subpoena “disgraceful.”

But luckily, the agency backed off last week, alerting BuzzFeed it would not enforce the subpoena. Still, BuzzFeed is calling on DHS to fully rescind the order.

“Until ICE withdraws its subpoena completely, its stance toward the free press remains the same: anti-American, unconstitutional, and grossly inappropriate,” BuzzFeed News spokesperson Matt Mittenthal said.

Across the Country

• BuzzFeed News: ICE Is Trying To Force BuzzFeed News To Divulge Its Sources (Hamed Aleaziz)

• Capital Gazette: Congress passes bill authorizing fallen journalist memorial in D.C., includes honors to murdered Capital Gazette staff members (Brooks Dubose)

• CNET: Edward Snowden asks Trump to pardon Julian Assange (Laura Hautala)

• Forbes: A Record Number Of Journalists Were Arrested In 2020, Most Covering Racial Unrest (Jemima McEvoy)

• The Hill: Connecticut's largest newspaper loses its newsroom (Celine Castronuovo)

• Mother Jones: How a Private Prison Company’s Defamation Suit Against One of Its Critics Backfired (Madison Pauly)

• The New York Times: Arizona Man Who Conspired to Threaten Journalists Gets 16 Months in Prison (Azi Paybarah)

• Stars and Stripes: Defense bill would continue Stars and Stripes' funding (Corey Dickstein)

Around the World

• Bloomberg: China Authorities Detain Bloomberg News Beijing Staff Member (Reto Gregori and Madeleine Lim)

• Deutsche Welle: Journalists end up in jail for reporting on coronavirus crisis

• The Financial Times: Polish media deal revives fears over press freedom (James Shotter)

• The Hill: Al Jazeera journalist files hack and leak suit against Saudi Arabian and UAE crown princes (Maggie Miller)

• The Washington Post: A murder in Veracruz: Slain journalist’s story a portrait of a violent, corrupt era in Mexico (Dana Priest, Paloma de Dinechin, Nina Lakhani and Veronica Espinosa)

In Tech

• Adweek: Donald Trump’s Twitter Account Is in Jeopardy (Scott Nover)

• The New York Times: Facebook says it will remove coronavirus vaccine misinformation. (Mike Isaac)

• The Wall Street Journal: In India, Facebook Fears Crackdown on Hate Groups Could Backfire on Its Staff (Jeff Horwitz and Newley Purnell)

Columns and Opinions

• The Financial Times: Journalist Maria Ressa on holding President Duterte to account (Maria Ressa)

• The Financial Times: Democracy cannot function without media freedom (Stef Blok)

• The New York Times: A Powerful Reporter Got Away With Sexual Misconduct for Decades. His Paper, and His Union, Looked the Other Way. (Ben Smith)

• The Washington Post: Trump is leaving press freedom in tatters. Biden can take these bold steps to repair the damage. (Margaret Sullivan)

Around the Press Freedom Community

• Knight Institute: Knight Institute Asks Mayor Lightfoot to Stop Blocking Critics from Her Official Facebook Page

• Knight Institute: A First Amendment Agenda for the New Administration

• Open Society Justice Initiative: Federal Court Orders U.S. Intelligence Agencies to Explain Withholding of Khashoggi Tape and Report

• RCFP: US House of Representatives passes Open Courts Act with bipartisan support (Melissa Wasser)

• Reporters Without Borders: RSF and 60 other organizations call for an EU anti-SLAPP directive

• UN News: World Press Freedom Conference spotlights dangerous job of separating ‘truth from falsehood’

• The Washington Post: The Washington Post joins other news organization in new Forbidden Stories investigation

• The Washington Post: The Washington Post Press Freedom Partnership announces #FreeAustinTice awareness campaign

Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Like what you read and want to support me? Consider donating via a paid subscription here. I’ll see you next Tuesday! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.

This is the 60th issue of Pressing and it’s great to have you with me. Please send me feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and tips at sgnover@gmail.com.

Macron Backs an Oppressive New Security Law

Want to record the police? Don’t do it in France, Emmanuel Macron says.

A new security bill in France has sparked outrage among the press freedom community for criminalizing filming police as they work. Violations would be punishable with a fine of $53,300 (or, €45,000) and a one-year stint in prison.

It’s a disarmingly authoritarian move for a leader who has positioned himself as a proponent of press freedom.

“I understand the sentiments being expressed and I respect them. But you must understand my role right now, it’s to do two things: to promote calm and also to protect these rights,” Macron told Al Jazeera recently. “I will always defend in my country the freedom to speak, to write, to think, to draw.” (Re: draw, remember the Charlie Hebdo massacre just a few years ago.)

The proposed law has sparked protests, but even under national pressure, the French police haven’t acted appropriately—they already tear gassed protesters and arrested a television reporter who was covering the demonstrations.

If Western democracies want to be seen as beacons of press freedom, they need to act like beacons of press freedom. When the police cannot be questioned, filmed, or photographed, they operate without accountability. The citizens of France will be worse off if this bill passes.

READ MORE:

• Columbia Journalism Review: Emmanuel Macron’s press-freedom hypocrisy (Jon Allsop)

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How to Restore America from the ‘Fake News’ Era

There’s been a lot of chatter about how to reverse the anti-press freedom agenda of the Trump administration, but Joel Simon at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has a set of concrete proposals. Since anti-press rhetoric has been such a big part of Trump’s effort to delegitimize independent media, Simon wants to see Biden thoroughly bake press freedom advocacy into his foreign policy and diplomacy.

“One way that the Biden administration can reverse some of the damage is to speak out consistently whenever journalists are jailed or they’re threatened or there’s censorship, incorporate the defense of press freedom into its foreign policy,” Simon said on CNN’s Reliable Sources Sunday.

Simon said that one way to do this is for Biden to appoint a special presidential envoy for press freedom “who would be empowered to speak out whenever journalists are under threat and ensure that U.S. foreign policy is focused on defending journalists and their rights around the world.”

In the same segment, PEN America’s Suzanne Nossel highlighted her organization’s call for a congressional commission on local news, which she says would help rebuild a “healthy information ecosystem.”

Obviously, the Trump administration has done nothing to help rebuild local news, so it feels bizarre to transition back to leadership that might care enough to acknowledge the role of journalism, local or otherwise. I feel like it’s a luxury to discuss these things, but it’s also uncomfortable—like working out a muscle that you’ve ignored for four years.

But I wouldn’t sell that short: The recognition that journalism is important, Simon and Nossel assert, is a significant policy position after four years of America’s government denigrating the press.

The scandal at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) exemplifies how different the last four years have been. When Trump tried to Trumpify the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and the rest of our state-run but editorially independent media outlets, it signaled a lack of recognition about how the agency actually worked and why we fund it.

At their core, these outlets promote democracy around the world by delivering reliable news and information to people in less-free societies who might not otherwise get it. The credibility and accuracy of these outlets, plus their willingness to report unsavory news about the U.S. government was the entire point of the USAGM as an instrument of American foreign policy. By attempting to undermine the agency, Trump never appreciated that he was further undermining America’s own credibility abroad.

Trust in U.S. media has suffered under Trump, and Biden has an opportunity to help rebuild it. CPJ and PEN each have proposals as to how to do this, including stronger pro-press freedom rhetoric, strengthening the USAGM, calling out press freedom abusers, committing to bringing home journalists held hostage, and filling freedom of information requests.

CPJ framed the imperative well: “The robust, pluralistic, and independent domestic media, protected by the First Amendment and a political culture that tolerated and even encouraged aggressive reporting, has been the envy of journalists everywhere,” they wrote. “History backs our firm belief that in the realm of press freedom, the U.S. is the indispensable nation.”

• Last edition: Back to basics—Can We Get Back to Prioritizing Press Freedom?

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What Else Is New?

• Bloomberg: Top Diplomats Say Media Freedom ‘Under Attack’ in Hong Kong (Iain Marlow)

• Columbia Journalism Review: How will Biden’s new team treat the press? (Jon Allsop)

• The Diplomat: In Southeast Asia, Press Freedom Takes a Turn for the Orwellian (David Hutt)

• RCFP: US Supreme Court to hear arguments on hacking law, First Amendment implications (Mailyn Fidler)

• Nieman Lab: Just how broken is our political information ecosystem, anyway? (Joshua Benton)

• Vice: Would You Send an Email to Release an Innocent Person from Prison? (Ben Charlie Smoke)

• Voice of America: Critics Decry Zimbabwe's Press Freedom Failures (Columbus Mavhunga)

• Voice of America: Disinformation on Social Media Is Threat to Democracy, Rappler CEO Says (Graham Vyse)

• Voice of America: RTHK Arrest in Hong Kong Is Further Blow to Press Freedom (Tommy Walker)

• The Washington Post: Fox News needs to reinvent itself for the post-Trump era. Here’s one radical idea. (Margaret Sullivan)

Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Like what you read and want to support me? Consider donating via a paid subscription here. I’ll see you next Tuesday! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.

This is the 59th issue of Pressing and it’s great to have you with me. Please send me feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and tips at sgnover@gmail.com.

Can We Get Back to Prioritizing Press Freedom?

I’m not sure I would have a newsletter about press freedom if it weren’t for Donald Trump. I began publishing Pressing last June in the throes of unemployment, but I had previously written about press freedom crises and grew passionate about the rights and protections of journalists.

But those incidents I had written about—mainly, the battle over Jim Acosta’s press pass and the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi—could not have happened the same way during another administration.

Let me clarify. Could a reporter get kicked out of the White House? Certainly.

The Nation reporter Robert Sherrill went through decades of the White House denying his press pass without explanation and his case provided precedent for Acosta. But, in the current media environment, I doubt we would’ve seen another president so brazenly punish one of cable news’ top reporters in this way.

And a Clinton administration likely would not have stopped Mohammed bin Salman from ordering Khashoggi’s assassination, but it would have responded very differently.

• From September: A “Verdict” for Jamal

In the last four years, Trump’s “fake news” rhetoric has seeped into the essence of the country, further polluting the waters for a country that already distrusted institutions.

It’s hard to describe the total net effect on the press freedom community, but Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, puts it well in Foreign Policy:

“Until four years ago, press freedom in the United States was mostly a back-burner issue with legal specialists, civil liberties groups, and media companies waging fights against government secrecy and to defend the line on issues like defamation and journalists’ right to protect their sources. That began to change in 2016, as then candidate Donald Trump ramped up attacks on the press during his campaign, fomenting hostility toward journalists.

Trump’s abuses of the press had international consequences too:

Leaders around the world, including Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro have all parroted Trump’s cries of fake news, seeking to discredit critical media coverage. Arrests and attacks on journalists by law enforcement during this year’s racial justice protests made international headlines, undercutting the United States’ credibility in calling out similar excesses when they occur abroad.

As we prepare for the Biden administration, I don’t know that we’ll ever heal the soul of our country or the relationship between the people and the press, but I know there’s work to do. And that goes beyond rhetoric. Biden won’t call journalists “fake news,” but he needs to do more to restore our credibility as a country that respects the free and independent press.

• From last week: What Happens When No One Trusts the Press?

Nossel calls for better White House press protocols, more transparent and open government, less prosecution of leakers that threaten journalists’ source protection, better training for law enforcement on First Amendment rights, restore the credibility of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, end the “tit-for-tat battles with foreign governments” over the status of foreign journalists, and push for additional sanctions for human rights abusers and press freedom abusers around the world.

I hope that this newsletter and our nation can move on from the Trump administration, an era defined by undermining trust in reputable institutions. I hope I can write more about whistleblowers and open government and focus on press freedom imperatives in other countries. But the United States won’t be cured of Trumpism overnight, and the press will have permanent scars. Journalists need to move on, but also grapple with what transpired while working to rebuild trust.

What do you think about the Biden administration’s relationship with the press? Leave a reply in the comments.

Leave a comment

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Clearly, it’s press freedom awards season. The rest of my newsletter will detail some of the community’s latest recognitions.

Magnitsky Awards

The Sergei Magnitsky Human Rights Awards were given out Monday. The awards, like the Magnitsky Act, a law that allows the U.S. to sanction human rights abusers, are named after Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian tax lawyer who was arrested and died in prison after investigating tax fraud by government officials. Bill Browder, a friend of Magnitsky, administered the awards, which were given to:

• Loujain Alhathloul, the imprisoned Saudi women’s rights activist;

• The Belarus Free Theatre, an underground performance and activism group;

• The children of assassinated Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia;

• Nathan Law, a student activist in Hong Kong;

• The Russian journalist Sergei Mokhnatkin, who was tortured and died in prison;

• and Dutch legislators Sjoerd Wiemer Sjoerdsma and Pieter Omtzigt, who led an effort to get the European Union to adopt a version of the Magnitsky Act.

READ MORE ABOUT THEM:

• CNN: Pro-democracy leader Nathan Law leaves Hong Kong (Eric Cheung and Philip Wang)

• Euronews: What is the Magnitsky Act and why is the EU planning one of its own? (Michael Daventry)

• The Guardian: Belarus Free theatre's rebel troupes stand up to the Lukashenko regime (Shaun Walker)

• Insider: The killing by car bomb of Daphne Caruana Galizia is one of the most brutal unsolved crimes against journalists (Sinéad Baker)

• Middle East Eye: UN raises alarm over Saudi activist Loujain al-Hathloul's health following hunger strike (Nadda Osman)

• Radio Free Europe/Radio Free Liberty: 'They've Been Killing Him For Years': Russian Activist Sergei Mokhnatkin Is Dead At 66 (Mark Krutov and Robert Coalson)

The Michael Kelly Award

Atlantic Media gave this year’s Michael Kelly Award to The New York Times’ Azam Ahmed, tMexico City bureau chief for the paper of record. Here’s why:

The horrifying cycle of violence that afflicts so many Latin American countries is rendered with deeply felt humanity in Azam Ahmed’s five-part New York Times series, “Kill, or Be Killed: Latin America’s Homicide Crisis.” Ahmed explores the root causes of the many thousands of killings in the region every year. He moves beyond the numbers to paint memorable portraits: a brave Honduran pastor, a remorseful Mexican killer, a teenage Guatemalan mother. “Underpinning nearly every killing is a climate of impunity that, in some countries, leaves more than 95 percent of homicides unsolved,” Ahmed writes. “And the state is a guarantor of the phenomenon—governments hollowed out by corruption are either incapable or unwilling to apply the rule of law, enabling criminal networks to dictate the lives of millions.”

The award is named after Michael Kelly, The Atlantic’s former editor, who was the first American journalist to be killed in the Iraq War.

CPJ Awards

The Committee to Protect Journalists will present its 2020 International Press Freedom Award in a virtual ceremony Thursday. The press freedom group first announced the winners in July:

• Shahidul Alam, a Bangladeshi photojournalist who spent 102 days in prison in 2018 for posting a video about student protests to social media;

• Mohammad Mosaed, an Iranian reporter who was forced to resign from his job under government pressure and was twice arrested for criticizing the regime;

• Dapo Olorunyomi, the founder and publisher of The Premium Times, a Nigerian newspaper, who has been “a fierce defender of press freedom in Nigeria despite repeated government harassment” and has been arrested multiple times;

• Svetlana Prokopyeva, a Russian correspondent for Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, the U.S. state-run news agencies, who was convicted of “justifying terrorism” for discussing a suicide bomb attack on the radio.

Human rights attorney Amal Clooney will receive the Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award. Clooney has represented Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, the Reuters reporters imprisoned in Myanmar, and Maria Ressa, the Philippine journalist charged with “cyber libel.”

The Media Freedom Award

Britain and Canada partnered for this first-ever award for media freedom, awarded to the Belarusian Association of Journalists. The Canadian government said that the group was “singled out for its ongoing commitment to journalistic ethics and principles and its perseverance and self-sacrifice in the face of increased targeted crackdowns on media in Belarus.”

• From September: Belarus vs. The People

Profiles

• The Atlantic: Never Trump, Forever (Olga Khazan)

• The New York Times: Savannah Guthrie Is Feeling Lucky (Sridhar Pappu)

• NPR: Despite Losing Her News Job, One Woman Continues To Report On The Election In Georgia (Lulu Garcia-Navarro)

• WNYC/On The Media: A Former Conservative Blogger On the Failures of Right-Wing Media

What Else Is New?

• Al Jazeera: India’s Supreme Court in spotlight over bail for divisive anchor (Valay Singh)

• CBS News: Maria Ressa calls for "emergency intervention" in social media: "It is untenable for democracy" (Elizabeth Elkind)

• The Daily Dot: Video shows Proud Boys member punching journalist during ‘Million MAGA March’ (Kahron Spearman)

• The Guardian: Concern over French bill that cracks down on photos identifying police (Kim Willsher)

• Reuters: Hong Kong journalist appears in court amid fears over press freedom (Jessie Pang)

• The Wall Street Journal: Trump Allies Explored Buyout of Newsmax TV as Fox News Alternative (Benjamin Mullin, Juliet Chung, Keach Hagey and Rebecca Ballhaus)

• The Wall Street Journal: Parler Makes Play for Conservatives Mad at Facebook, Twitter (Jeff Horwitz and Keach Hagey)

• Voice of America: Secondary Targets: When You Can’t Punish a Journalist, Family Will Do Just Fine (Sirwan Kajjo)

• Voice of America: RTHK Arrest in Hong Kong Is Further Blow to Press Freedom (Tommy Walker)

Columns and Opinions

• CJR: Don’t let Biden’s victory cloud the issue: journalism needs to reach Americans again (James Ball)

• The New York Times: The President vs. the American Media (Ben Smith)

• The Washington Post: Mike Pompeo’s legacy of incompetence peaked with his failed Iran policy (Jason Rezaian)

• The Washington Post: MSNBC’s Jon Meacham problem (Erik Wemple)

• The Washington Post: How Western media would cover the U.S. election if it happened in another country (Karen Attiah)

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  Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Like what you read and want to support me? Consider donating via a paid subscription here. I’ll see you next Tuesday! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.

This is the 58th issue of Pressing and it’s great to have you with me. Please send me feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and tips at sgnover@gmail.com.

Goodbye, Donald Trump. Please go in peace.

Sadly, one of the defining characteristics of the Donald Trump presidency has been its attacks on institutions, including the free and independent press. Many of us in the news media have been desensitized to Trump and his cronies calling us “fake news” or its more malicious counterpart, “the enemy of the people.” While relationships between American presidents and the media have been contentious in the past, none has ever been this openly hostile.

But, bashing the media didn’t begin with Donald Trump and it won’t end with his exit from office. While it’s not unique to Republicans, it’s been a tried and true political strategy for the party since at least the Barry Goldwater campaign, which railed against the “liberal” media in Goldwater’s quest for the presidency.

• CNN: Attacking the press for liberal bias is a staple of Republican campaigns—and it all began in 1964 (Nicole Hemmer)

Additionally, the ascent of Fox News in the late 1990s was built on the notion that it was a conservative alternative to everything else, claiming all other news media was liberal. The Republican Party became Foxified and, as the network hardened in its ways, so did the party.

While the GOP set the stage for a candidate like Donald Trump, I doubt they could’ve imagined that Trump himself would mount a serious run, get nominated and win. But he did. And he built his success in large part by demeaning everyone around him that didn’t stroke his ego. As journalists, we are tasked with reporting and analyzing, not praising any politician as a demigod. And presidents of both parties have, for the most part, respected the careful and tenuous balance between the White House and the press corps. Trump threw that out the window.

But his norm-breaking didn’t stop at undermining the press. Trump attacked the the intelligence community, depleted the diplomatic corps, isolated us from our allies, befriended autocrats, attempted to blackmail political opponents, interfered with “independent” government agencies, ignored the assassination of a journalist living in America, withdrew from longstanding international commitments, pushed bunk science in the face of a deadly pandemic, refused to denounce white supremacists, threatened whistleblowers, fired inspectors general, put a partisan propagandist in charge of our state-run media, unleashed the National Guard against peaceful protesters, and regularly employed racism, misogyny, and xenophobia in his rhetoric, politics and policies.

In the beginning of the Trump presidency, people often remarked, “This is not normal.” It got old and overused, but it’s still true. None of this was normal. And it may not return to normal any time soon.

Trump’s malice is aimed at the very core of American democracy. His attacks around the election have centered on the very forces that can prevent him from sticking around indefinitely: the postal service, mail-in ballots, state and county election officials, and, of course, the press. “Trump is attempting a coup in plain sight,” Vox’s Ezra Klein wrote this week amid the president’s bogus claims that he won the election. (He did not.) “That this coup probably will not work — that it is being carried out farcically, erratically, ineffectively — does not mean it is not happening, or that it will not have consequences,” Klein wrote.

• Vox: Trump is attempting a coup in plain sight (Ezra Klein)

I think this is an important point: The American press takes American democracy for granted. Thankfully, we have not lived in an America where doing journalism is a real act of resistance, where it’s brave, where it’s truly dangerous. We don’t live in a country where journalists end up dead in back alleys, where our cars explode suddenly, or where we’re poisoned just for doing our jobs.

We take the peaceful transition of power for granted. But, we cannot do that any longer. The peaceful transition of power is a norm and Trump has no interest in norms. Barton Gellman has led by example, writing a pair of articles for The Atlantic that, if all goes well, will seem like silly speculative fiction when we reread them in the Biden era.

• The Atlantic: The Election That Could Break America & How Trump Could Attempt a Coup (Barton Gellman)

But, even if we avoid this worst case scenario—Trump concedes and peacefully transitions power to President-elect Joe Biden—we need to reckon with what Trump has done. He has sought to further undermine confidence in the press, which was already frayed, and degraded every other check and balance placed upon him. And that didn’t come out of nowhere. In fact, it was a long time coming.

And it could happen again. If we don’t find a way to mend the relationship between the American people and the press, what is the point of our work? How do you hold the powerful to account when much of the population views politics as a game and not as a way to govern?

If we didn’t realize this before Trump, we each need to realize one thing: the American experiment is incredibly fragile. Our democracy is not a given.

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What Else Is New?

• Adweek: Why 2020 Was the Twitter Election (Scott Nover)

• CNN: Biden aide: The president-elect knows the media's job is to 'hold him accountable' (Brian Stelter)

• Foreign Policy: Attacks on the Press Track a Democratic Backslide (Sushma Raman)

• The Guardian: Concern over French bill that cracks down on photos identifying police (Kim Willsher)

• The New York Times: Gene Mater, Champion of Press Freedom, Dies at 93 (Richard Sandomir)

• The New York Times: As Hong Kong Law Goes After ‘Black Sheep,’ Fear Clouds Universities (Vivian Wang)

• The New York Times: TV Journalist Is Arrested as Assaults on Press Freedom Rise in India (Sameer Yasir)

• Press Gazette: Study reveals press freedom falling off the news agenda despite worsening global picture (Charlotte Tobitt)

• RCFP: The next legal battle (or three) over location tracking (Grayson Clay)

• Rest of World: The Journalist vs. Facebook (Peter Guest)

• Voice of America: Vietnam Seeks to Further Limit Press (An Hai)

• The Washington Post: Facial recognition used to identify Lafayette Square protester accused of assault (Justin Jouvenal and Spencer S. Hsu)

• The Washington Post: As Trump began floating baseless claims of election fraud, television networks cut away (Jeremy Barr)

• The Washington Post: Biden’s victory seemed clear for more than a day. So why did the media hold off on calling it? (Paul Farhi and Elahe Izadi)

Columns and Opinions

• The Los Angeles Times: Democracies around the world are under threat. Ours is no exception (Michiko Kakutani)

• The New York Times: It’s the End of an Era for the Media, No Matter Who Wins the Election (Ben Smith)

• The Washington Post: Another Trump term could be a fatal blow to press freedom (Jason Rezaian)

• The Washington Post: Four years too late, the TV establishment puts Trump on mute (Erik Wemple)

• The Washington Post: The media never fully learned how to cover Trump. But they still might have saved democracy. (Margaret Sullivan)

Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Like what you read and want to support me? Consider donating via a paid subscription here. I’ll see you next Tuesday! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Like what you read and want to support me? Consider donating via a paid subscription here. I’ll see you next Tuesday! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.

This is the 57th issue of Pressing and it’s great to have you with me. Please send me feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and tips at sgnover@gmail.com.

Trump vs. Pompeo on Austin Tice

Last week, I wrote about Austin Tice, the freelance journalist who has been missing in Syria for more than eight years. A Wall Street Journal report indicated the Trump White House was committed to bringing him home—a positive development after many years of silence between the U.S. and Syrian governments.

• Pressing: Bring Austin Tice Home

• The Wall Street Journal: Top White House Official Went to Syria for Hostage Talks (Dion Nissenbaum and Jared Malsin)

Despite my critical writing about President Donald Trump—on just about all matters relating to the press and press freedom—I wrote that I am rooting for his success in bringing Austin home.

I also referenced a piece by Jacob Tice, Austin’s brother, that ran in a series of newspapers. Jacob and his family have spent many breaths praising Trump’s supposed commitment to the cause. Jacob wrote:

No president in our history has been more personally committed than President Donald Trump to bringing home American citizens held abroad. Our president has made it clear, time and again: The return of Americans is a deeply personal priority for him. It was from him, this March, that America first heard Austin’s name said aloud by a president. My heart leapt that day. My family appreciates the powerful effort this administration is exerting to bring him home. We have felt the progress, centimeter by excruciating centimeter.

This week, Austin’s mother, Debra Tice, took a different approach, but one that still appealed to Trump personally.

“Our family was elated to read in the Wall Street Journal that President Trump recently sent Kash Patel, a top White House aide, to Damascus, Syria, to begin the first real dialogue with the Syrian government in almost a decade…We are thrilled the President took this step. President Trump has had historic success in bringing home U.S. hostages. He is an advocate and an ally to families like ours.”

But her praise stopped at the gates of the White House: her ire toward the State Department was unrelenting.

“Unfortunately for Austin, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is undermining the President’s crucial outreach, refusing any form of direct diplomatic engagement with the Syrian government,” she wrote. “During his press briefing on October 21st, he stood before the State Department press corps and said, in essence, there is nothing he is willing to do to bring my son home. This is in stark contrast to President Trump’s statement, ‘We stand with the Tice family and will not rest until we bring Austin home.’” 

USA Today: Bring my journalist brother home by Thanksgiving (Jacob Tice)

National Press Club: Bring Austin Tice Home for Thanksgiving (Debra Tice)

It’s an odd dynamic: A family pushing an American president while criticizing his Secretary of State.

That being said, it could work with this president, whose actions are often made in isolation from his cabinet officials.

But, The Washington Post’s Liz Sly and Suzan Haidamou report that, unfortunately, Trump’s efforts haven’t produced any results yet. Their sources indicate that the Syrian government hasn’t even acknowledged having the talks and won’t consider releasing Tice and other hostages unless the U.S. lifts sanctions and removes troops from the troubled country.

U.S. and Syria don’t have formal relations, which makes the effort to secure Austin’s release even trickier. Instead, they have relied upon Abbas Ibrahim, Lebanon’s top security official, as a go-between.

And despite Trump’s efforts, Pompeo has said they will not change U.S. foreign policy to negotiate for Austin’s release. “To link the departure of U.S. troops from Syria to the otherwise noble effort to release hostages is to mix strategic and humanitarian issues,” Pompeo said in a recent news conference.

Likely, the issue will not resolve before the election next week. It’s crucial, however, that the next president take seriously the role of the United States securing Austin’s release. Whatever that takes.

What will it take? Do you think Tice is actually alive and well in Syria? Certainly smarter foreign policy minds than me understand the nuance in this case. I would love to hear from you. Reply to this email and leave me some thoughts to consider.

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Khashoggi’s Fiancé Sues MbS

Hatice Cengiz, the fiancé of Jamal Khashoggi, has sued Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in U.S. federal court, alleging that he ordered the Jamal’s assassination during a 2018 visit to the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul. (The CIA has independently concluded that MbS was behind the killing.)

The lawsuit was brought with the U.S. nonprofit Democracy for the Arab World Now against MbS and 20 defendants last week. While actual enforcement in this case is unlikely, if Cengiz is successful, the suit does one thing for sure: keeps public pressure on the administration—or the next one—to seek justice for Jamal.

• The Wall Street Journal: Jamal Khashoggi’s Fiancée Sues Saudi Crown Prince in U.S. Court (Stephen Kalin)

• Al Jazeera: We will not allow Khashoggi’s killers to evade justice (Michael Eisner and Sarah Leah Whitson)

• Pressing: A “Verdict” for Jamal

What Else Is New:

• Al Jazeera: Al Jazeera’s Mahmoud Hussein held in Egypt prison for 1,400 days

• Columbia Journalism Review: How the press covered the last four years of Trump (Jon Allsop and Pete Vernon)

• Columbia Journalism Review: The legal landscape for frontline student journalists (Jonathan Peters)

• The Los Angeles Times: They once knew which lines not to cross. But Arab journalists say the lines are expanding (Nabih Bulos)

• The Media Nut: What's a newspaper presidential endorsement worth? (Josh Sternberg)

• Mother Jones: Facebook Manipulated the News You See to Appease Republicans, Insiders Say (Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffrey)

• The New York Times: How The Epoch Times Created a Giant Influence Machine (Kevin Roose)

• The New York Times: False Political News in Spanish Pits Latino Voters Against Black Lives Matter (Patricia Mazzei and Jennifer Medina)

• Voice of America: Press Freedom Groups Accuse Tanzania of Squeezing Media Ahead of Elections (Charles Kombe)

• The Wall Street Journal: Facebook Seeks Shutdown of NYU Research Project Into Political Ad Targeting (Jeff Horwitz)

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The Opinion Pages:

• The Seattle Times: If reporters focus on clicks, they won’t focus on news (Christian Trejbal)

• The Sydney Morning Herald: When the public side with the powerful over press freedom, we all lose (Osman Faruqi)

• The Washington Post: Kristen Welker asked the candidates about The Talk. That moment proved the value of newsroom diversity. (Margaret Sullivan)

Student Media:

• The Daily Princetonian: Ressa ’86 discusses ‘cyber libel’ conviction at Press Freedom Defense Fund event (Marissa Michaels)

The Press Freedom Space:

• CPJ: Russian journalist Irina Slavina dies of self-immolation after harassment by authorities

• CPJ: Conspiracy theories grow in the U.S., creating threats to journalist safety (Katherine Jacobsen)

• CPJ: #PressSafety2020: Safely covering the 2020 U.S. elections

• Politico: U.S. weighs labeling leading human rights groups ‘anti-Semitic’ (Nahal Toosi)

• RCFP: Signs of movement for encryption policy? (Grayson Clary)

• RCFP: RCFP legal director offers tips for navigating Freedom of Information Act during Investigative Reporters and Editors panel (Caitlyn Jordan)

The Twittersphere

• Armin Rosen, a writer for Tablet who was assaulted while covering Black Lives Matter protests in New York, posted an interesting update to his story.

Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Like what you read and want to support me? Consider donating via a paid subscription here. I’ll see you next Tuesday! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.

This is the 56th issue of Pressing and it’s great to have you with me. Please send me feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and tips at sgnover@gmail.com.

Bring Austin Tice Home

Lawrence Wright’s “Five Hostages” is seared into my brain. I was a sophomore in college at George Washington University, taking a shuttle from one class to another across town, but lost myself in the story.

At NPR, they call this a “driveway moment.” For public radio broadcasters, it’s a yardstick for success when a listener parks the car at their destination but stays in their vehicle to listen to the remainder of the story, almost losing track of where they were going or need to be. Everything else is on hold. The same thing happened to me, except I almost missed my stop, as I was so engrossed in the story.

As the headline indicates, Wright’s story concerns five hostages—James Foley, Theo Padnos, Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller—and the effort by David Bradley, the owner of The Atlantic, and a small team of his staff and associates, to unite the hostages’ families and bring them home.

The New Yorker: Five Hostages (Lawrence Wright)

It’s a story I read before I knew I wanted to be a journalist, before I knew what media reporting was, before I worked at The Atlantic, and before press freedom was something that kept me up at night.

But I was moved by the story of private citizens, and one wealthy benefactor, who worked on their own to bring home five hostages—journalists and activists—when no one else, including the U.S. government, really would.

Wright’s story is about the role of the U.S. government and its policies towards hostage negotiation and ransom payment. It’s murky territory, as the government doesn’t pay ransoms and gives hostages’ families and their advocates little information about efforts to free them.

American journalists don’t often go missing overseas. When they do, it typically doesn’t end well. Foley, Sotloff and Kassig were beheaded by ISIS executioners. Mueller was raped by ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, forced into “marriage” and possibly executed or killed in an airstrike.

Out of Wright’s five hostages, only Padnos survived. The details of his release are still not fully known, though they allegedly didn’t involve payment of the €22 million ransom on his head.

Bradley and his team helped negotiate the release.

Since 2012, Austin Tice, a freelance journalist, has been missing in Syria. In many ways, he’s the poster boy for American press freedom efforts.

Austin’s parents, Marc and Debra, and the Trump administration each say he is alive, though they have provided scant details about his whereabouts.

However, a new report in The Wall Street Journal offers some hope that the administration is actively trying to secure Tice’s release: Dion Nissenbaum and Jared Malsin report that Kash Patel, a deputy assistant to Trump for counterterrorism, traveled to Damascus earlier this year to try and secure the release of Tice and Majd Kamalmaz, a Syrian-American therapist who disappeared in 2017.

The Wall Street Journal: Top White House Official Went to Syria for Hostage Talks (Dion Nissenbaum and Jared Malsin)

It also says that Trump wrote Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad a letter this spring proposing a dialogue about Tice, and national security advisor Robert O’Brien recently met with Lebanon’s security chief, a key mediator with Syria, to discuss the situation. However, the article says that despite Trump’s interest, “talks with the Assad regime haven’t gotten very far.”

President Trump’s interest in Austin Tice’s case is welcome. While I have written very critically of the president’s rhetoric toward journalists, his general disregard for the free press, his blind eye toward Jamal Khashoggi’s killers in the Saudi government, and much more that he says and does that I consider dangerous, I am unabashedly rooting for Trump’s success in bringing Austin Tice home.

Rereading Wright’s piece, which takes place at the height of ISIS’s power, I am also left questioning if the Obama administration did all it could to bring its citizens, and its journalists, home.

As we near an election, I pray that freeing Austin Tice remains a priority for Trump or Vice President Joe Biden, whoever wins in November.

Journalists are bruised and exhausted at home in the United States and there’s a lot we need to do to heal. But beyond that, we, as a reporting corps, will never be full until Austin comes home and is out of harm’s way.

MORE ON THIS:

• USA Today: Bring my journalist brother home by Thanksgiving (Jacob Tice)

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In the Headlines

• Adweek: Twitter and Facebook’s Editorial Decisions Clash With Questionable New York Post Reporting (Scott Nover)

• The Guardian: Dutch state broadcaster pulls logo from vans after attacks (Jon Henley)

• The Guardian: ABC journalist Dan Oakes will not be charged over Afghan Files reporting (Paul Karp)

• The Hill: Trump calls CNN 'dumb bastards' for covering coronavirus (Brett Samuels)

• Mother Jones: Now We Know Facebook Made Changes to Show You Less News From Mother Jones (Ben Dreyfuss)

• The New York Times: New York Post Published Hunter Biden Report Amid Newsroom Doubts (Katie Robertson)

• The New York Times: As Local News Dies, a Pay-for-Play Network Rises in Its Place (Davey Alba and Jack Nicas)

• Nieman Lab: Is Facebook too big to know? The Markup has a plan (and a browser) to wrap its arms around it (Joshua Benton)

• Rest of World: Who’s afraid of a meme? Pakistan’s TikTok ban is not like the ones in other countries. (Meher Ahmad) … Update: Pakistan rescinded its TikTok ban after just 11 days.

• Sacramento Bee: Devin Nunes ends lawsuit against McClatchy as company emerges from bankruptcy (Kate Irby)

• Sacramento Business Journal: Bee journalists, newspaper guild say they're fighting McClatchy proposal to tie pay to clicks (Mark Anderson)

• The Wall Street Journal: How Mark Zuckerberg Learned Politics (Deepa Seetharaman and Emily Glazer)

• The Washington Post: I ran political advertising for Twitter. It’s time for platforms to mute Trump. (Peter D. Greenberger)

• The Washington Post: Court rules Trump appointee overstepped authority when he tried to replace media fund’s leadership (Paul Farhi)

• The Washington Post: MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle filmed promotional spots for JPMorgan Chase — one of the banks she covers as a journalist (Paul Farhi)

• Wired: The Election Will Bring a Hurricane of Misinformation (Whitney Phillips)

Per the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker… A federal judge ordered Fast Company senior news editor Marcus Baram to release a source’s identity pertaining to a 2017 article about tech entrepreneur Shervin Pishevar’s arrest.

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The Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Awards were awarded last night, judged by First Amendment lawyer Ted Boutros and Columbia Journalism Review editor Kyle Pope and presented by HBO host Bill Maher.

The honorees include CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez, who was arrested live on-air while covering the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis, Minn.; David E. McCraw, deputy general counsel at The New York Times; Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz, documentary filmmakers whose film “Immigration Nation” the U.S. government tried to censor; University of Kentucky student Michael Frazier whose activism led to the Kentucky’s Campus Free Speech Protection Act; Andrea Dennis and Erik Nielson for the book Rap on Trial, which looked at how rap lyrics have been used as criminal evidence to convict young men of color; and Ira Glasser, the former director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Vice News and Retro Report have a new hour-long film about Donald Trump’s toxic relationship with the press called “Enemies of the People” which is available for free on YouTube.

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