The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far left columnist Will Bunch skeeted an editorial by the UK’s left-wing The Guardian about protecting journolists, oops, sorry, journalists.
The Guardian view on Trump’s threat to the media: time to pass the Press Act
Bipartisan legislation offers historic protections for journalists, banning secret surveillance and ensuring source confidentiality
Tuesday, December 10, 2024 | 1:40 OM EST
Fears of a press crackdown under Donald Trump’s second term deepened with his nomination of Kash Patel as FBI director – given his calls for retribution against journalists. Yet a rare chance to protect press freedom has emerged. The bipartisan Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (Press) Act, the strongest press freedom legislation in US history, is on the brink of a vote. While President-elect Trump has urged Republicans to block it, the Senate could still deliver it to Joe Biden before the lame-duck session ends in January.
The Press Act would ban secret government demands for journalists’ communications from tech giants such as Google or Verizon and protect reporters from jail for refusing to reveal sources. For investigative reporters to do their jobs – holding government officials to account for corruption and wrongdoing – they need to be able to protect the confidentiality of their sources. With courts recently weakening already-imperilled “reporter’s privilege” protections, this bill would finally give journalists in the US federal protections comparable to those afforded to other relationships where confidentiality is paramount, such as lawyers and clients, doctors and patients, and spouses.
This is kind of specious: confidentiality as far as journalists are concerned is not the same thing. Rather than keeping a closely held secret, journalists are expected to disseminate the story widely.
That said, I am not opposed to the bill, as long as it covers much more than just those employed by the credentialed media.
The bill has something for both Democrats and Republicans to like. The Press Act’s broad and nonpartisan definition of “journalist” takes into account the modern media landscape: you don’t have to work full-time for a mainstream media organisation to be covered. Freelancers, independent reporters writing Substack newsletters and even journalists posting primarily to social networks such as X would be included. It protects right-leaning journalists just as much as anyone at the New York Times or the Guardian.
So, William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove, Robert Stacy McCain of The Other McCain, the American Free News Network, and even little old me, would be protected? Cool!
If I write a story on illegal immigrants, and happen to mention that I might know someone who is illegal, the government couldn’t question me about whom it was?
There’s more at the original, and it isn’t protected behind a paywall.
However, I would add here that I am less worried about this than I am about protecting normal people from being investigated by the government for their political beliefs, as the FBI had been investigating “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics,” and Director Christopher Wray lied about the extent of it. We all know that the credentialed media would have been aghast had the FBI been disclosed as investigating Muslims, but apparently checking on Catholics, even while the President of the United States was Catholic, was seemingly no big thing.
As for Mr Bunch? A month before the election, he let us know how displeased he was that we evil reich-wing Republicans stymied President Biden’s attempt to create a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, just after saying, “If you believe strongly in largely unfettered free speech, as I do,” writing:
But like the Democrats’ famous Clinton-era line about abortion, constitutionally protected fibbing should be safe, legal, and rare. The theory is that the government shouldn’t punish or censor folks for fringe, extremist views, but this quaint idea has been swamped by the storm surge of one of our two political parties using disinformation as its national platform.
After Trump’s 2016 election, when it was clear that deliberate falsehoods on social media, some of them generated by our Russian adversaries, were becoming a major problem, there was a brief and highly unsuccessful effort to wage a war against disinformation. In 2022, Republicans screaming — without justification — about censorship crushed an effort to create a Disinformation Governance Board within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. A disinformation specialist at Harvard says she was forced out of her job under pressure from Facebook. The pathways were cleared for a flood of raw sewage, some of it generated by artificial intelligence, in the 2024 campaign.
Miss Lorenz, now in the middle of celebrating the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, wrote:
Jankowicz’s experience is a prime example of how the right-wing Internet apparatus operates, where far-right influencers attempt to identify a target, present a narrative and then repeat mischaracterizations across social media and websites with the aim of discrediting and attacking anyone who seeks to challenge them. It also shows what happens when institutions, when confronted with these attacks, don’t respond effectively.
Those familiar with the board’s inner workings, including DHS employees and Capitol Hill staffers, along with experts on disinformation, say Jankowicz was set up to fail by an administration that was unsure of its messaging and unprepared to counteract a coordinated online campaign against her.
Note how, according to Miss Lorenz, Miss Jankowicz was attacked by “far-right influencers” using “mischaracterizations” and “discrediting and attacking anyone who seeks to challenge them.” This was copy not from a responsible journalist, but could have been written by Amanda Marcotte.
Miss Lorenz claimed that the “far-right” had claimed that the Disinformation Governance Board, characterized by “far-right influencer Jack Posobiec” as the Ministry of Truth, was nothing close to what Mr Posobiec claimed it to be. Yet without real, published guidelines, and a watchdog over its performance, how could anyone mischaracterize something that had no real definition?
Let’s tell the truth here: Mr Bunch, the lovely Taylor Lorenz, and many of our other friends on the left, would subject the speech of conservatives to some form of ‘truth checking’ by the government. That former and future President Trump will be taking office again in forty days ought to make them reconsider. They might have loved having Nina Jankowicz parsing and possibly censoring what conservatives say and write, but be a bit less thrilled if Tucker Carlson or Jack Posobiec were doing that job.