Trump Wins, the Press Loses -- Columbia Journalism Review
When Trump was inaugurated in 2017, nine journalists were arrested while covering the protest that ensued in Washington, DC, including several who were charged with rioting. That set a tone for the next four years, over which more than two hundred reporters faced criminal charges for covering protests. The vast majority of those charges came in 2020, after the police murder of George Floyd, as journalists scrambled to chronicle the racial-justice protests that seized the nation. According to Kirstin McCudden of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, it was a year of unprecedented attacks, with a “record shattering” six hundred and forty assaults on journalists, and nearly a hundred and fifty arrested.
Expect a return of the massive national demonstrations that characterized that year, particularly if Trump makes good on his campaign promise to execute the “largest deportation program in American history.” The first time around, in 2017, Trump’s executive order preventing the entry of citizens from seven majority-Muslim nations into the United States triggered protests at airports across the country. A year later, demonstrations proliferated in response to his child-separation policy. If and when mass protests are organized against the new administration’s hard-line immigration orders, journalists will be at extreme risk of police assault or arrest for covering the story—particularly the photographers and videographers who need to be within arm’s reach of law enforcement to capture their confrontations with demonstrators.
Gabe Rottman, from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, sees particular danger for journalists covering immigration, because of the lack of clear guidelines on handling the press at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Border Patrol as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Elements of DHS don’t operate under the same types of internal constraints that you see at the Justice Department,” ... he brought up a 2019 report from NBC’s San Diego affiliate, describing how DHS had compiled a list of ten journalists whom agents were instructed to detain for questioning at local ports of entry.
The DOJ has historically had a stronger tradition of what Rottman called “internal constraints” on targeting the press. But that may go out the window once a new attorney general is in place. As Kash Patel, a Trump devotee and contender for that role, put it last year, “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media. We’re going to come after you.”
The most obvious early consequence of the DOJ’s new regime will be pursuit of leak investigations. In Project 2025, the policy blueprint drafted by ... Dustin Carmack, a former chief of staff to Trump’s director of national intelligence, wrote, “The Department of Justice should use all of the tools at its disposal to investigate leaks and should rescind damaging guidance by Attorney General Merrick Garland that limits investigators’ ability to identify records of unauthorized disclosures of classified information to the media.” The Garland guidance, dating to 2021, was issued as something of a trust-building gesture, given that the DOJ under Trump had surveilled at least eight journalists (at the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN) as part of 334 leak investigations.
In the coming years, we can expect that number to rise. And if a reporter won’t talk? Before a crowd in Texas in 2022, Trump suggested that the threat of rape in prison might be enough to compel a journalist to identify an anonymous source: “When this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner shortly, he will say, ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that was.’”
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/media_trump_resistance.php
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