Journalism experts urged future reporters to prepare for the existing and potential threats posed by the government and advancing technology to press freedom in a panel held on Tuesday at the Walter Cronkite School.
Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post Executive Editor and the the Weil Family Professor of Journalism at the Cronkite School, said during the event that covering the federal government is harder than ever for journalists. He said the difficulty will likely trickle down to smaller, local governments.
“More and more government officials are afraid to to talk to [journalists] than ever before,” Downie said. “This has had a career-chilling effect on journalism and is making it much more difficult to do the kind of reporting that holds the government accountable.”
The panel, hosted by the Committee to Protect Journalists and Bloomberg News, featured Downie and Internet Advocacy Coordinator with the Committee to Protect Journalists Geoffrey King. It is the first in an ongoing series at journalism schools nationwide, though future dates are still being determined, said Magnus Ag, spokesman for the committee.
Tuesday’s panel came after the Committee to Protect Journalists’s annual “Attacks on the Press,” a comprehensive assessment of the threats to the freedoms of press and information and how to protect them. The published assessment was available for free to attendees at the panel.
Downie said part of the problem is the U.S. government and its agencies’ reluctance to share information or allow information to spread by way of its legal pull. He said journalists have frequently found themselves in difficult legal situations for simply doing their job.
King said not all legal situations come from reporting on tricky topics. He advised the prospective journalists in attendance to consider the possibility that any story could potentially instigate a federal agency to become involved in a journalist’s coverage.
“Things can get much bigger than you might expect,” King said.
King attributed much of the government’s watchfulness to the NSA and its surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden last year, an event that sparked national debate over the government’s transparency.
Cronkite sophomore and attendee David Hensley, 20, said he followed the NSA and Snowden coverage adamantly.
“This is what brought me to study journalism,” Hensley said, adding that he shares King’s viewpoint that understanding the threats governments pose to journalism is just as critical to the public as it is to journalists.
Downie and King told the room that journalists need to be careful and secure with how they report and interview.
“Some national security reporters literally arrange to meet their sources at cocktail parties in Washington so that they don’t have to meet at allocation where they might be monitored,” Downie said.
Both advised students to conduct electronic transactions with sources through various methods of encryption or at computers that do not connect to the internet — a place King later said faces risks of its own.
“U.S. policy choices have made things worse for internet freedom and given cover to some really bad ideas that could basically break the interconnectedness of the internet itself,” King said.
To conclude the event, Downie said, “I felt pretty happy coming into this discussion but Geoff is really depressing me.”
Contact the reporter at jjprice2@asu.edu
