WASHINGTON: The war on news leaks by President Barack Obama’s administration is becoming a threat to press freedom and democracy, a media watchdog group said on Thursday.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, in a report based on interviews with dozens of experienced news professionals, said the US president’s actions have been in sharp contradiction to his promise of transparency and open government. “Journalists and transparency advocates say the White House curbs routine disclosure of information and deploys its own media to evade scrutiny by the press,” said the report written by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie.
“Aggressive prosecution of leakers of classified information and broad electronic surveillance programs deter government sources from speaking to journalists.”
Downie, now a professor of journalism at Arizona State University, said Obama has failed to live up to his pledge to make his administration the most transparent in American history. Downie added that the Obama administration’s “war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate.”
He said the 30 experienced Washington journalists he interviewed at a variety of news organisations whom I interviewed for this report “could not remember any precedent.” The report on the United States is unusual for the press freedom group, which has completed reports this year on Burma, China, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, and Tanzania. The only time the United States has been the subject of a CPJ report was 19 years ago, in a study on attacks on immigrant journalists.
The report relates how the US government has conducted more than twice as many criminal prosecutions for alleged leaks of classified information than all the previous administrations combined.
It notes the administration’s “Insider Threat Program,” which requires federal employees to monitor the behaviour of their colleagues, and the use of secret subpoenas to monitor journalists’ electronic communications. Highlighted in the report is the use of the Espionage Act to crack down on news leaks.
This was used to prosecute Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a State Department contract analyst who disclosed information about North Korea’s nuclear plans to a Fox News reporter.
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