A Free Press If You Can Keep It: Journalism Under Attack

Remember the quaint days when our prestige media were claiming that President Donald Trump was a danger to the country because he called our mainstream media “enemies of the people” and because the spoiled adolescent Jim Acosta had his White House press pass taken away for his increasingly bad behavior?  

Two actions against journalists this week show that a free press has much more to fear under the Biden Administration than it ever did under the Trump Administration. And the reasons for that have to do with the way in which power and authority operate in our country these days—with no transparency and little Constitutional mandate.

The first action was really part two of a saga. Part one was the week before. After being laid off, CBS reporter Catherine Herridge had her all her files and her computer seized by CBS. As Jonathan Turley wrote, journalists who spoke to him about the event were not only shocked by the talented reporter being laid off but were horrified by this unprecedented action on the part of the company. Turley quoted one former CBS manager who said that he had “never heard of anything like this” and found it “outrageous” since it endangered the confidentiality of her sources. Given that one of the stories she had been pursuing was Hunter Biden’s laptop, there is something very dark about this action. While CBS returned the files this Monday, February 26, after pressure both from the union (SAG-AFTRA) and the House Judiciary Committee, the chilling effect of this action on journalists working on politically sensitive topics is incalculable.  

Part two of the Herridge saga came on Friday when she was held in contempt of court by Obama appointee judge Chris Cooper because of her refusal to reveal her sources in a 2017 report about Dr. Yanping Chen, a naturalized U. S. citizen who ran a school in Virginia. As Julie Kelly writes, Herridge reported that Chen was under investigation by the FBI “for suspected ties to Chinese government, feeding information about US military personnel to the Chinese, and falsifying her immigration records related to her past service in the Chinese Army.”

There is something deeply disturbing about this situation. As lawyer and scholar Hans Mahncke commented, “Everyone knows that if instead of Catherine Herridge reporting on a suspected Chinese spy this was about a Washington Post stenographer making false claims about Trump, ‘Judge’ Cooper would be lecturing us about the paramount importance of protecting sources.”

The second event this week was the Friday morning self-surrender to the FBI of Blaze Media reporter Steve Baker. Baker was then brought in belly and leg chains before a judge for four different misdemeanor charges, listed by his boss Glenn Beck in a tweet as: 

• “Knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority
• Disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds
• Disorderly conduct in a Capitol building
• Parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building

To the final three, Beck appended the parenthetical note “Didn’t happen.” To the first, he added, “So, will they arrest the NYT journalist who entered BEFORE Steve through a broken window?”

I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one. If they do, it will be like their arrest of Ray Epps: full of sound and fury but signifying nothing of legal consequence.

No, the reality is that what probably bothers the DOJ about Baker is that he has steadfastly reported on the oddities of January 6, 2021. As Baker himself said late Friday in an interview with the Steve Deace Show after being released, “All of this is about the suppression of speech and teaching those of us on the Right side of the political spectrum what we can and cannot say and what is allowed.”

What has Baker reported on? As Brad Geyer, one of Baker’s attorneys, told The Epoch Times, “Without Steve Baker’s early reporting, crucial aspects of events, such as unlawful force, the Capitol breach, and the role of suspicious actors in influencing events of the day might have gone unnoticed.” Geyer added that Baker had “proved two crucial government witnesses in the Oath Keeper prosecutions provided outrageously false testimony” and, most recently, “has raised disturbing questions about the origin and earnestness of the investigations of the ‘pipe bombs.’”

In short, Baker has been digging his nose a little too deeply in unexplained aspects of January 6 that point to government miscarriages of justice after the fact—and possible government involvement in the events during the day.

On the same day that Steve Baker was taken into custody, J. Michael Waller of the Center for Security Policy posted CSPAN footage of Senator Ted Cruz’s January 11, 2022, grilling of the FBI’s Jill Sanborn on FBI involvement on January 6. Waller observed: “Two years have passed & the @FBI still can’t say ‘no’ in response to these question. ‘Did any FBI agents or confidential informants commit crimes of violence on January 6?’ ‘Did any FBI agents or FBI informants actively encourage and incite crimes of violence on January 6?’”

While journalists like to talk about taking on abuses of government power, it is Herridge and Baker who have actually done so. And they are being persecuted and even prosecuted for doing so. That this is happening under the Biden Administration is no surprise, for it was well known that Biden’s former (and likely current) boss Barack Obama, and not Donald Trump, was the real enemy of a free press. Even the New York Times had published articles such as Albert R. Hunt’s 2014 piece “Under Obama, a Chill on Press Freedom,” in which the author stated that “the administration has prosecuted more whistle-blowers for leaks and gone after more journalists than any of its predecessors.”

Hunt actually put his finger on something important, which is significant for the current cases. He quoted unnamed “insiders” who attributed the administration’s action to “the pressure of the powerful national security apparatus and the fear among Obama aides that the president could face the wrath of the intelligence community if he fails to act tough.” Obama may well have ridden the deep state beast, but it was not clear that, in the end, he held the reins.

What is most frightening about the current attacks on journalists is not simply that a presidential administration might be using law enforcement to punish political enemies and limit speech. What is most frightening is that we have an administrative state and government agencies that seem to rank above the president. For all the Democratic blather about threats to “our Democracy,” the reality is that our democratically elected officials don’t seem to wield much power.

Whatever his failures in his first term, Donald Trump took on that unseen and unelected government power. And Chuck Schumer famously warned him not to. “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” Unlike Barack Obama, Trump did not knuckle under. And we know the rest of the story: the Russian Collusion Fraud, the massive government-tech censorship activity in anticipation of the 2020 campaigns, and the continuing use of DOJ power to get rid of him.

Benjamin Franklin famously responded to a question about whether the new country was a republic or a monarchy with the line, “A republic, if you can keep it.” The difficulty of our day is that we are having a hard time keeping that republican form of government. Right now, we are having a difficult time keeping one of the essential elements of that republic, the free press.

Journalists and liberals may like Obama and Biden. But if they don’t want democracy to “die in darkness,” as the Washington Post’s pretentious tagline has it, they had better start fighting back against the attacks on Catherine Herridge, Steve Baker, and all of us.     

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.