Opinion: Watch what Trump does about the media, not what he says

He hates us, he really hates us!

With apologies to Sally Field, that’s the news media’s takeaway from President Trump’s speech Friday to the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Trump wasted little time in lambasting the “fake news,” which, in his view, takes in a lot of the mainstream media.

“A few days ago, I called the fake news the enemy of the people,” he told the group. “And they are. They are the enemy of the people. Because they have no sources, they just make ‘em up when there are none.”

Later the man who made a career out of passing along information from murky sources had the chutzpah to suggest that the press “shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name.”

The coup de grace was his statement, which rang ominously in the ears of some of my colleagues, that the “fake news” component of the press “doesn’t represent the people, it never will represent the people, and we’re going to do something about it.”

Even before Trump’s speech on Friday, some journalists had raised the alarm level to DEFCON 2, citing honor rolls of journalists who had been killed or imprisoned for the public’s right to know and reminding Trump that, contrary to his slur, reporters were not the “enemy of the people.” (At CPAC, the president said he had intended that term to apply only to purveyors of fake news.)

When the Washington Post introduced its new slogan — “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — it was widely viewed as a response to Trump’s denunciation of the press. (The newspaper insisted there was no connection.)

Trump’s bad-mouthing of the press is unpresidential, to put it mildly, and it gets our collective goat. Journalists have feelings, too.

Infinitely more important, however, is how he acts as president. Even then, there is a difference between freezing certain news organizations out of briefings (as the administration did Friday), offensive as that is, and pursuing changes in the law or public policies that would abridge press freedom.

Take Trump’s notorious suggestion during the campaign that he would “open up the libel laws” to make it easier for public figures to win defamation suits against the press. The fact is that there are no federal libel laws. Federal courts do hear libel cases, but they are tried under state law.

The only influence a president can have on libel law is through his appointment of federal judges, especially Supreme Court justices, whose interpretations of the 1st Amendment can affect the prospects of libel plaintiffs. But, as Adam Liptak of the New York Times noted, the libel rulings of Trump’s nominee to the court, Judge Neil Gorsuch, “show no inclination to cut back on protections for the press.”

In another area, there may be more cause for concern. Trump has been railing about leaks lately, tweeting on Friday: “The FBI is totally unable to stop the national security ‘leakers’ that have permeated our government for a long time.“

Will his administration break with the practice of recent administrations and prosecute journalists who published stories based on leaked information under the Espionage Act? (The Obama administration stopped short of doing that, but during its term, the FBI identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a possible “aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator” in an investigation of a State Department security contractor suspected of leaking information about North Korea.)

A campaign against journalists in an attempt to plug leaks would be a far more dangerous threat to the 1st Amendment than a months’ worth of presidential monologues about “fake news” and “dishonest media.”

John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s attorney general (and future Watergate figure) famously said: “Watch what we do, not what we say.” That’s a good advice for the press in judging whether Trump is the enemy of our people.

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