President Obama compared his record of supporting a free press to President Trump’s during a Friday speech in Chicago.
“It shouldn’t be Democratic or Republican to say that we don’t threaten the freedom of the press because they say things or publish stories we don’t like,” Obama said during a speech at the University of Illinois. “I complained plenty about Fox News, but you never heard me threaten to shut them down, or call them ‘enemies of the people.’”
While Obama has refrained from characterizing the media as “the enemy of the people,” Department of Justice during his presidency monitored the phone records of journalists considered hostile to the administration and tried to compel a New York Times reporter to release the name of a confidential source. The administration also labeled another a Fox News reporter an “un-indicted coconspirator” in prosecuting a government official for leaking classified information under the Espionage Act.
When pressed on his record of dealing confrontationally with the press, Obama has defended his administration’s efforts as being vital to national security.
“I am a strong believer in the First Amendment and the need for journalists to pursue every lead and every angle,” Obama said in an interview with the Rutgers University student newspaper in 2016. “I think that when you hear stories about us cracking down on whistle-blowers or whatnot, we’re talking about a really small sample.
“Some of them are serious,” he added, “where you had purposeful leaks of information that could harm or threaten operations or individuals who were in the field involved with really sensitive national security issues.”
In a 2013 report published by the Committee to Protect Journalists, former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie called the Obama administration’s adversarial stance toward the press “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.”
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