Trump Is Damaging Press Freedom in the U.S. and Abroad

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday, President Trump took his anti-media rhetoric to a new level, doubling down on his description of journalists as “the enemy of the people” and calling for an end to the use of anonymous sources. This on a day when his press secretary Sean Spicer barred reporters from The New York Times, BBC, BuzzFeed News, CNN, Politico, The Los Angeles Times and The Huffington Post from his daily White House press briefing.

The unrelenting attacks on the news media damage American democracy. They appear to be part of a deliberate strategy to undermine public confidence and trust by sowing confusion and uncertainty about what is true. But they do even greater damage outside the United States, where America’s standing as a global beacon of press freedom is being drastically eroded.

This is not just a matter of United States prestige. At a time when journalists around the world are being killed and imprisoned in record numbers, Mr. Trump’s relentless tirades against “fake news” are emboldening autocrats and depriving threatened and endangered journalists of one of their strongest supporters — the United States government.

the United States has had tremendous moral influence when it spoke out about press freedom violations, and not just because of the commitment to the First Amendment. The fact that United States political leaders regularly withstood relentless criticism in the press gave them legitimacy when they called for the protection of critical voices in repressive societies.

For example, the Obama administration, through public statements and behind-the-scenes diplomacy, helped win the release of imprisoned journalists in Ethiopia and Vietnam. President George W. Bush regularly spoke out about press freedom violations, in places like Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

Earlier this month, the Venezuelan government suspended CNN’s Spanish language network following accusations by President Nicolás Maduro that the network manipulates the news. President Trump was silent. Really, what could he say?

So far, Mr. Trump’s war on the media has been mostly a war of words. But those words have consequences. It is leaders of autocratic countries, not democracies, who make a point of telling journalists how they should do their job. Praising positive coverage while lashing out at reporters who write something critical gives succor to the likes of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a country where news outlets have been shuttered and a record number of journalists imprisoned. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s attacks on the use of anonymous sources undermine the work of journalists reporting sensitive stories in repressive and dangerous environments from Iraq to Mexico, where source protection is a matter of life and death.

Mr. Trump’s attacks on the news media follow a political logic. They rally those among his supporters who despise the media for its perceived liberal bias; they erode the credibility of the media itself, undermining demands for accountability; and they serve as the ultimate distraction, in the most recent example deflecting public attention from reports that Trump administration officials are impeding the investigation into their ties to Russia.

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