. . . But as the State Department touts its press freedom record in a press release today and encourages other countries to improve their own laws, it’s also important to critically look at the U.S.’s current approach to press freedom, in particular their statement that “the United States honors and supports media freedom at home and abroad.”
Journalists’ sources in the U.S. have been the hardest hit in recent years. The current administration has used the Espionage Act to prosecute a record six whistleblowers for leaking information to the press—more than the rest of the previous administrations combined. Many of these whistleblowers have exposed constitutional violations such as the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program and the CIA’s waterboarding practices—issues clearly in the public interest—and now face years in prison. Meanwhile, the Justice Department has brought no prosecutions for the crimes underlying the exposed allegations.
In addition, a grand jury is reportedly still investigating WikiLeaks for violations of the Espionage Act for publishing classified information—a practice that has traditionally been protected by the First Amendment and which other newspapers engage in regularly.
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The U.S. also has repeatedly detained Oscar-nominated filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras at the border. Poitras has received critical acclaim for two films she has produced about the U.S.’ post-9/11 wars, and is in the midst of making her third film on the subject. As Glenn Greenwald reported, “On several occasions, her reporter’s notebooks were seized and their contents copied, even as she objected that doing so would invade her journalist-source relationship,” clearly violating her rights as a reporter.
And while the State Department said today that they “advocate for freedom of expression and raise media freedom issues, including specific cases, in bilateral discussions with other governments and in multilateral bodies,” the administration has come under fire for lobbying the Yemeni government to keep a prominent Yemeni journalist Abd al-Ilah Haydar Al-Sha’i in jail. 
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