Now Is the Time to Stand Up for Press Freedom
Bad-faith lawsuits, ugly smears, and even violence against journalists are becoming more common. To that, we must all say, ‘Enough.’
LAST THURSDAY NIGHT, I GAVE AN AWARD to Satya Rhodes-Conway. She’s the mayor of the liberal bastion of Madison, Wisconsin, where I live. It was received on her behalf by Dylan Brogan, the city’s spokesperson, who, as I explained to an audience of several dozen people in a hotel conference room in downtown Madison, had told me he had come to listen and not speak.
That’s partly because it was not the kind of award that a person might brag about. Rather, it was the “Nopee,” which stands for No Friend of Openness. It’s one of six Openness in Government Awards, or Opees, that the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council has given out annually since 2007. The council, for which I have served as president since 2004, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, all-volunteer group that seeks to protect Wisconsin’s tradition of transparent government. Similar organizations operate in other states.
The Wisconsin Newspaper Association, a trade group representing the state’s newspapers, hosted the event, which included a sitdown meal and two other presentations dealing with open-government issues in Wisconsin. The five awards besides the Nopee are the Popee (Public Openness Advocate), the Copee (Citizen Openness Advocate), the Mopee (Media Openness Advocate), the Scoopee (Open Records Scoop of the Year), and the Whoopee (Whistleblower of the year).
One by one, I went through this list of winners. The Popee went to the Milwaukee Police Department for helping a UW-Milwaukee journalism class obtain records of old missing-persons cases. The Copee went to American Oversight, a liberal watchdog group that fought for years to get records from a disastrously failed Trump-instigated probe into alleged fraud in the 2020 election. The probe was conducted by former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who was recently charged by the state’s Office of Lawyer Regulation with ten counts of alleged misconduct, several dealing with his disregard for the state’s transparency laws.
The Whoopee winner was Todd Heath, a Wisconsin man who has fought since 2008 to blow the whistle on a telecommunications company he says has been overcharging schools and libraries millions of dollars for internet access and other services. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that his case can proceed. The Wisconsin Examiner news outlet won the Mopee for successfully suing over high costs and long delays in obtaining public records. And Milwaukee television station TMJ4 clinched the Scoopee for uncovering serious problems with the county district attorney’s office’s list of law-enforcement officers with credibility problems. The winners all came to the podium and made remarks.
Next came the Nopee, our award for the mayor. Bear with me—this may seem like a story about a local politician, but it’s really about our need for a nationwide defense of the press.
ON DECEMBER 17, THE DAY AFTER a mass shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison claimed the lives of three people—a student, a teacher, and the student shooter, who took her own life—and injured several others, two critically, a press conference was held. At one point, Mayor Rhodes-Conway, frustrated by questions for which she had no answers or patience, delivered a tongue-lashing to the press. This is what she had to say:
It is absolutely none of y’all’s business who was harmed in this incident. Please have some human decency and respect for the people who lost loved ones, or were injured themselves, or whose children were injured. Just have some human decency, folks. Leave them alone. Let them grieve. Let them recover. Let them heal. Don’t feed off their pain.
An AP story that included these words appeared in papers across the country, and the mayor’s office, I’m told, received tremendous positive attention. The media, meanwhile, became the recipients of fresh scorn.
One reader of the AP story, in which I was also quoted (arguing that the authorities were being too tight-lipped), sent me an email that piggybacked off of the mayor’s remarks. He accused the press of being “vultures” who “pound on the doors of the home[s] and ring the phones of the victim’s families,” all in order to “sensationalize the stories increasing their personal importance in driving up readership of the papers and viewership of the TV news to satisfy the public's unquenchable appetite for unnecessary personal details of the gore.”
Of course, that is not what reporters do. As I was quoted saying in a fine column on this brouhaha by Judith Davidoff, the editor of the local paper Isthmus, “Reporters seek information on victims not to exploit them but to honor their memory as unique human beings.” Davidoff also quoted from an open letter to the mayor from Vincent Filak, a professor of journalism at UW-Oshkosh, who explained the process of reaching out to crime victims and their families, based on his two decades of experience as a reporter, editor, and newsroom adviser. In some cases, people decline or even express anger, in which case “I’d apologize and back away,” Filak wrote. But often, the people contacted welcomed the opportunity: “All they want to do is talk about how great their kid was, or how amazing their parent was or whatever stories make them feel less hurt.”
At the Opee Awards event, I challenged Rhodes-Conway’s harsh suggestion that reporters were lacking “human decency” and trying to “feed off” the suffering of others: “The fact is, the media whose job it is to cover such horrible stories are hurting, too. Their compassion for victims and their families is just as real as the mayor’s.” I suggested that the reason she did not apologize when her remarks drew criticism is because she liked the attention her media-bashing brought.
And since spokesperson Brogan was not there to speak, I used the time allocated to reflect on why the Opee judges, myself included, felt that Rhodes-Conway deserved negative recognition over other contenders. (Other candidates for this year’s Nopee included a state representative who forced a small news outlet to incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses and nearly go out of business defending itself against his specious defamation lawsuit, which was eventually thrown out of court.) Here’s how I put it:
I think it’s because the press is tired of getting kicked around. We’re tired of being used by politicians seeking to score cheap political points. Tired of being called the enemy of the people, or derided for an alleged lack of fairness or accuracy, often by people who have absolutely no regard for either. There’s not a reporter I know who is not more conscientious about getting things right than most politicians.
Over the years, I think our default position, as journalists, has been to take it on the chin. To absorb the attacks, put our heads down, and keep doing our jobs. And I think it’s time for that to end. I for one am never going to let someone put the press down for no good reason without pushing back. I am not going to allow other journalists to be disparaged because it’s fashionable to do so. It’s true that those of us in the press sometimes offend people in power, and make a nuisance of ourselves by demanding openness and accountability. But we are not the enemy of the people. We are not the enemy of the police. We are not even the enemy of Mayor Rhodes-Conway. We are professionals who deserve to be treated with respect. And it’s time that we started insisting on it.
MAKING THESE REMARKS, LET’S BE CLEAR, required absolutely no courage. This was, after all, a roomful of journalists and supporters of their craft. (Afterward, Brogan, himself a former longtime Isthmus reporter, let me know that he discussed the speech with Mayor Rhodes-Conway, “and she’s taking your words seriously.”)
But I am bringing this matter to your attention because I think such exertions in defense of the Fourth Estate are important, and they need to start coming from every quarter. Donald Trump has treated the press with thundering contempt, seeking to blunt its ability to be a check on his abuse of power, just as he intends with his similar denigration of the judicial branch.
This has created real risks for reporters throughout the land. Last year, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, recorded eighty physical attacks on journalists while they were doing their jobs. It also documented forty-eight arrests, detainment, or criminal charges against journalists, more than the previous two years combined.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has been waging open warfare on members of the media who report things he does not like. He’s threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of major networks. He’s filed a defamation lawsuit against the board that awards Pulitzer Prizes for honoring the New York Times and the Washington Post for their entirely accurate coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He’s suing CBS News over its editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris during last year’s campaign, claiming he is owed $10 billion in damages for its “deceptive manipulation of news.”
Trump is even suing the Des Moines Register for running a poll of Iowa voters shortly before the 2024 election that showed him trailing Harris. He says this amounts to “brazen election interference,” which makes no sense, given that, if this report had any impact at all, it was to energize his supporters to turn out and help him win, which is what they did.
“It’s clear that Trump is waging war on the press,” Samantha Barbas, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, told the New York Times. “Trump and his lawyers are going to use any legal claim that they think has a chance of sticking. They’ll cast a wide net to carry out this vendetta.”
The media needs to take the lead in fighting back, and to some extent has done so. The AP, for instance, is suing the White House for denying it customary press access in retaliation for the news service’s choice to continue referring to the Gulf of Mexico. And while there had been rumblings that CBS News might seek some sort of a settlement over the 60 Minutes interview, causing some alarm among CBS staff, the network’s lawyers filed a motion last Friday to dismiss Trump’s lawsuit, calling it “an affront to the First Amendment . . . without basis in law or fact.”
But there was a troubling capitulation on the part of ABC News, which Trump sued because of a slightly incorrect statement made by one of its anchors, George Stephanopoulos. He said Trump had been found “liable for rape” in the successful civil case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll. In fact, Trump was found liable for sexual abuse under New York State law, although the judge noted that it was for conduct that met the commonly understood definition of rape.
Trump’s lawyers would have had a monumental task to prove Stephanopoulos’s mistake met the high standard for defamation of a public official, set by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling in New York Times Company v. Sullivan, of “actual malice.” But in December, ABC News agreed to apologize and give $15 million to Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum (plus another million to cover his legal fees).
Now is not the time for appeasement—not toward the president of the United States, not toward the liberal mayor of a famously progressive town. Rather, it is a time to fight, and it should be a fight in which the allegiance of the American public to a free and fair press is clear.
Don’t let them get away with it. Stand up for and with the journalistic profession. Subscribe (seriously). And when others try to tear the press down to build themselves up, just say no. Or Nopee.
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