Freedom of the Press

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

Rümeysa Öztürk may be out of jail but her ordeal isn’t over. It’s now the 52nd day that she’s facing deportation by the United States government for writing an op-ed it didn’t like. More press freedom news below. 

Attacks on the press aren’t just unconstitutional, they’re anticompetitive 

Some say President Donald Trump runs the country like a business. That’s debatable, though he certainly treats the press like one of his corporate rivals — including by targeting news outlets with legal actions that are normally seen in business litigation. 

His lawsuits are baseless. But they may open up opportunities for the press to go on the offensive with real legal claims. Trump’s attacks on the press aren’t only a product of his thin-skinned vindictiveness — he’s also acting as majority shareholder of Trump Media & Technology Group, owner of Truth Social, which he has alleged in court is a competitor of the media outlets he harasses. 

We wrote about the remedies that might be available to the press and others when Trump and Elon Musk undermine their competitors to line their own pockets. Read more here.

State Department must release Öztürk memo

In his ruling ordering Öztürk’s release, U.S. District Judge William Sessions III confirmed that Öztürk’s only apparent offense was co-authoring an op-ed critical of Israel.

He’s not the only one who said that there was no basis to deport Öztürk — according to The Washington Post, so did the State Department, before federal immigration officials abducted her anyway. But the memo the Post based its reporting on still has not been released, so we requested it under the Freedom of Information Act. But the government is stalling. 

The last memo we FOIA’d proved the administration was lying about its bases both for deporting Venezuelans to El Salvador and cracking down on leaks to the press. The public is entitled to know if the administration is misleading it again (spoiler alert, it is). Read more here. 

Nonprofit killer bill is back

We wrote last year about a ridiculous bill that would give the Secretary of the Treasury power to unilaterally deem nonprofits to be supporters of terrorism and revoke their tax-exempt status, with little to no due process. The bill is likely intended to target organizations that oppose the war in Gaza, but once that kind of power is codified there is no telling who might be targeted — including nonprofit news outlets. 

It was reintroduced this week, buried in a 300-page tax bill. It’s even more dangerous now that we’ve got an openly anti-free speech president who has already threatened to target nonprofits he doesn’t like. Tell your representative to oppose this censorship bill. 

What we’re reading

Why the fuck are Democrats helping build MAGA’s censorship machine with KOSA? (Techdirt). How can Sen. Richard Blumenthal or any other Democrat think for a second that this is a good idea, especially now? The current FTC will use the Kids Online Safety Act to go after tech companies that give kids news and information about gay rights, trans rights, abortion, racism, and more.

Trump White House sharpens its knives for Politico’s owner (The Bulwark).  Hate to say we told you so (again), but it was obvious that the bipartisan push to ban TikTok was going to normalize even more baseless attacks on foreign-owned news outlets. If your representatives supported it anyway, ask them what they were thinking.

Israel admits killing journalist in Gaza hospital bomb, saying he ‘documented’ 7 October massacre (The Journal). The Israeli army is basically admitting to murdering a journalist for “documenting” news. We don’t know what else to say.

Union will pay Review-Journal attorney fees in settlement over Henderson jail video (Las Vegas Review-Journal). Yet another example that should send a message to those who try to use baseless lawsuits to censor the press and hide the truth: It will cost you.

White House excludes wire services from Middle East trip (U.S. Press Freedom Tracker). In a break with tradition, President Donald Trump left for the Middle East on May 12 without any wire services in the Air Force One press pool. Read more about the harm attacks on wire services do to the news ecosystem.

Nassau County legislators want to create a moving 15-foot halo for its officers (Techdirt). Does anyone think those who support these buffer bills wouldn’t outright ban recording cops if they could get away with it? We shouldn’t give an inch to opponents of transparency, let alone 15 feet.

We’ve got big plans

Our new two-year strategic plan isn’t just about us: It’s about protecting the public’s right to know. A free press serves everyone. If we want journalism that challenges the powerful, we must defend press freedom, even when the press is imperfect. 

Journalists should be able to fearlessly investigate, publish, and speak truth to power. Otherwise, all that’s left is propaganda. Read more here.

We’re not your lawyers and this article isn’t legal advice. Talk to your attorney before taking any legal action.

Some say President Donald Trump runs the country like a business. That’s debatable, though he certainly treats the press like one of his corporate rivals – including by targeting news outlets with legal actions that are normally seen in business litigation. The claims are baseless. But they may open up opportunities for the press to go on offense.

Case in point, Trump recently took to his platform Truth Social to accuse The New York Times of “tortious interference,” a legal theory usually employed when one company undermines another’s contractual or business relationships. His reasoning? The Times cited experts who doubted the strength of his lawsuit against CBS for editing an interview with presidential rival Kamala Harris.

At risk of reading too much into Trump’s ramblings, he may have been accusing the Times of interfering with his expected settlement with CBS, which is reportedly afraid he’ll block its parent Paramount’s merger plans with media company Skydance if it doesn’t pay up. He also alluded to election interference, but that makes even less sense — the Times article ran five months after the election (and, of course, news reporting is not election interference).

That lawsuit against CBS doubles down on business litigation theories by including “unfair competition” claims, premised on Trump’s assertion that Truth Social competes with CBS. Trump loyalist and “special government employee” Elon Musk has similarly said his social media site, X, is a competitor of traditional media outlets. Both Trump and Musk have also sued news outlets and publishers under consumer fraud and deceptive business practices laws.

To state the obvious, news outlets cannot be held liable for citing legal experts or editing interviews. The Supreme Court has made clear that First Amendment protections can’t be circumvented by repackaging lawsuits aimed at punishing journalism under creative legal theories.

But the Constitution does not extend the same protections to malicious smear campaigns to harm business competitors. Routine hyperbole and exaggeration are not actionable (for example, “My car dealership is the best in town”), but verifiable lies to undermine competitors sure are (for example, “The car dealership across the street falsifies accident records to sell lemons”). So are other deceptive antics to undermine corporate rivals (“Hey carmaker, that’s a nice retailer agreement you’ve got with my dealership — wouldn’t want something to happen to it if you sell cars to that other place too”).

And that is exactly what Trump is up to — not just in his capacity as president, but in his capacity as majority shareholder of Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., owner of Truth Social. When he lies about Reuters and Politico receiving improper payments from the government, including misrepresenting contracts his administration signed with a Reuters business unrelated to its newsroom, he’s damaging Truth Social’s competition. Same goes for Musk and X.

Trump is not only retaliating against news outlets that don’t do his bidding, he’s abusing his office to boost his business interests

When Trump sics Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr on news broadcasters to baselessly threaten their licenses, or when he denies access to The Associated Press and other wire services that he sees as competition, he’s not only retaliating against news outlets that don’t do his bidding, he’s abusing his office to boost his business interests.

The potential legal theories against Trump, Musk, and their companies aren’t perfect. Trump’s mixed motives — anticompetitiveness as an entrepreneur, on the one hand, and censorship as an authoritarian on the other — complicate things, particularly given the legal immunity he enjoys and abuses.

But Truth Social and X aren’t immune, and neither is Trump, to the extent he was acting as a businessperson rather than a sitting president. It would sure be interesting to take discovery to find out what his real agenda is. Remember, Trump has long dreamed of starting his own media empire.

And whatever flaws the legal claims against Trump and his holdings may have, they’re a whole lot stronger than the nonsense lawsuits Trump pursues to shake down the press.

One problem is that many potential claims, like one for tortious interference, would need to be brought by a media outlet Trump targets. The same corporations caving to Trump probably won’t sue him. That’s unfortunate — principles aside, Trump has already shown that bending the knee doesn’t work. After ABC capitulated, he came after it again. It’s time to try a different approach.

But even if media companies don’t grow some courage, there could be avenues for others to sue. Unfair competition, and consumer fraud and deceptive business practices claims, depending on state law, may be available to impacted consumers, not just competing businesses. For example, a news publisher or reader who relied on the AP’s dispatches to their local newspaper until Trump banned his competitor may have remedies. So might someone (or a class of people) who wasted money on premium subscriptions to X based on Musk’s lies about his competition.

State attorneys general and other local authorities may be able to act as well. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an investigation into Media Matters for allegedly deceiving Texas consumers about hate speech on X. Paxton’s legal claims were unserious. Media Matters didn’t publish anything false. It’s also not a competitor of X and has never claimed to be.

But that doesn’t mean similar legal theories can’t succeed under different circumstances — like an actual self-proclaimed competitor of news outlets trying to sink their businesses with lies. Back in 2016, Trump settled a lawsuit alleging deceptive business practices (among other things) by then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman over Trump University’s shenanigans.

Yes, bringing these kinds of claims in cases involving the press could backfire by validating legal claims that could come back to bite journalists. That’s a legitimate concern, although the flip side is that they could force Trump and Musk to argue for limited readings of laws they’ve previously weaponized. But good lawyers should be able to navigate those minefields.

This is not a new problem — courts have long punished deceptive commercial speech while managing to distinguish it from journalism, political debate, and other constitutionally protected speech. As a completely random example, no one would suggest the First Amendment protects someone, say, hawking watches made in China and falsely marketing them as from Switzerland because it’s “free speech.”

Regardless, we’re living in unprecedented times and need to take more risks than we might prefer under normal circumstances. That doesn’t mean be reckless, but we can’t let hypothetical concerns about adverse precedents around the margins of constitutional law stop us from fighting back against someone who wants to destroy the First Amendment, full stop. If we pull punches in hopes of fighting another day, there might not be one.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

A federal judge ruled today that Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk must be released from U.S. custody. Öztürk was abducted by federal immigration authorities outside her home in Somerville, Massachusetts, on March 25.

The only known evidence for deporting Öztürk was her co-authorship of an op-ed critical of Israel in a Tufts student newspaper, and Judge William Sessions III confirmed it “literally is the case there is no evidence here … absent consideration of the op-ed.”

Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), commented that “it is unfathomable that in the United States legal system, it takes 45 days for a judge to rule that people can’t be put behind bars for writing op-eds the government doesn’t like. Without a system committed to its principles, the Constitution is just words on paper, and they don’t mean much if this can happen here. Öztürk’s abduction and imprisonment is one of the most shameful chapters in First Amendment history. We’re thankful that Judge Sessions moved it one step closer to an end and we call on the Trump administration to release Öztürk immediately and not attempt to stall with any further authoritarian nonsense.”

Lauren Harper, FPF’s Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy, noted that the government has kept secret a memorandum, prepared before Öztürk’s detention and reported in The Washington Post, showing there were not sufficient grounds for revoking Öztürk’s visa. Harper has submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for the memorandum.

“The government is not allowed to hide information to prevent embarrassment or conceal wrongdoing, which is exactly what’s happening here, and Ms. Öztürk and her lawyers deserve to have access to information that could aid in her legal case. If the administration wants to not have to disclose embarrassing information about its actions, it should stop making up reasons to deport people,” said Harper.

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

Dear friend of press freedom,

A judge ordered Rümeysa Öztürk’s release today. But it's still the 45th day she spent incarcerated by the U.S. government for writing an op-ed. Hopefully this shameful chapter in First Amendment history is nearing a close. Other press freedom news below.

Memo obtained by FPF shows DOJ’s new anti-press policy is based on lies

Last week, we argued that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s reversal of her predecessor’s policy restricting subpoenas of journalists will help President Donald Trump lie to the public. 

This week we proved it. A memorandum released following a public records request by Lauren Harper, our Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy, confirmed prior reports that U.S. intelligence agencies don’t believe Trump’s claims that Venezuela’s government controls the Tren de Aragua gang. Bondi’s memo cited that same reporting as an example of damaging fake news that results from leaks. 

As it turns out, the journalists who reported the intelligence agencies’ position got it exactly right, and the leaks in question only damaged Trump’s reputation by exposing the deception behind his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to ship Venezuelans to gulags in El Salvador. What better way to further our late co-founder’s legacy than exposing presidential lies to justify atrocities abroad? Read our press release and the New York Times report. 

Attacks on law firms and nonprofits endanger the press

It doesn’t take a law degree to see that Trump’s attacks on law firms and nonprofits could also do irreparable harm to press freedom. 

To learn more about what’s at stake, we spoke to legendary First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams; general counsel for The Intercept, David Bralow; and Albert Sellars, partner Kendra Albert. Read about and watch the conversation here. 

Ed Martin should be disbarred

Ed Martin, interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, was mostly in the news for palling around with white supremacists when Trump pulled his nomination for the permanent job as top prosecutor in Washington. But he’s also spent his career making a mockery of the ethical rules governing attorneys. 

That’s why Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) and Demand Progress filed a comprehensive disciplinary complaint against Martin. As our Advocacy Director Seth Stern explained, Martin’s antics, like sending “bogus letters and tweets to intimidate people exercising First Amendment rights and his threats to target news outlets President Trump dislikes, should disqualify him from practicing law, full stop.” Read more here. 

Lights, camera, national security crisis! 

Trump’s recent announcement that he plans to impose a 100% tariff on movies made outside the United States has created more confusion than the ending of “Inception.”

What is Trump talking about when he claims that making movies abroad threatens national security? When Trump claims to be protecting the homeland from foreign adversaries, he is often actually protecting his own false narratives from domestic scrutiny. Read more here.

Administration seeks to appoint itself the sole arbiter of truth

Trump’s vilification of the press should be seen in the context of his larger agenda to discredit any arbiter of fact and fiction that has not kissed the ring.

The goal is to make Trump’s “alternative facts” the only facts. That’s why the administration is going after not only journalists, but everyone from prestigious universities in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to small medical journals in Glenview, Illinois. Read Stern’s op-ed in the Daily Beast here. 

What does Fullerton, California, have to hide?

We joined First Amendment Coalition in a letter objecting to a ban on newspaper distribution in government buildings by the city of Fullerton, California.

As the letter explains, “The ban sends the message … that the city is hostile to the free press and discourages criticism of its policies, preferring that residents only read government-approved messaging.” Read the letter here. 

What we’re reading

Fear and intimidation at Newark airport (Al Jazeera). A Palestinian-American journalist was interrogated at the border about her reporting, but she refuses to stay silent. Journalists must continue to speak up about these abuses.

Jury orders NSO to pay $167 million for hacking WhatsApp users (Ars Technica). NSO Group has a long history of helping dictators and authoritarians spy on journalists and activists. Hopefully, this multimillion-dollar verdict will finally get their attention.

Montana governor signs landmark bill, as state becomes the 37th to enact anti-SLAPP protections (Institute for Free Speech). Legislatures in red and blue states alike understand there’s nothing partisan about protecting journalists, activists, and everyone else from anti-speech lawfare.

Takeaways from AFPC-USA’s 2025 World Press Freedom Day panel (The Association of Foreign Press Correspondents USA). FPF’s Seth Stern’s “remarks painted a stark picture of press freedom under direct political attack. He warned that without structural protections, the First Amendment itself is being tested, and norms that were once assumed unbreakable are now being shattered.”

A student journalist covered a pro-Palestine protest. Soon, her graduation came under threat (Columbia Journalism Review). Columbia hit a new moral low by targeting a student journalist for her reporting on a pro-Palestinian sit-in before changing course. Lesson learned? Nope. The university then stooped even lower by suspending student journalists for covering protests.

It doesn’t take a law degree to see that President Donald Trump’s attacks on law firms and nonprofits could also do irreparable harm to press freedom.

Since January, Trump has strong-armed law firms and targeted nonprofits, launching salvos against institutions he sees as roadblocks on his path to greater political control.

To learn about what’s at stake, we spoke to legendary First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams; general counsel for The Intercept, David Bralow; and Albert Sellars partner Kendra Albert at an online webinar May 2.

Albert kicked off the conversation by explaining the “dramatic chilling effect” of Trump’s executive orders against law firms that represented his political opponents or made legal arguments he didn’t agree with.

“Journalists need lawyers,” they said. “If you cow the lawyers from being able to take clients who are oppositional to the government, it’s going to harm the press.”

Last month, Albert co-authored an amicus brief in opposition to Trump’s attacks against the law firm Perkins Coie. It was signed by 61 media organizations, and led by The Intercept and Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF). Hours after the webinar, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell struck down Trump’s order targeting Perkins Coie as unconstitutional.

As Bralow explained, there once was a time when small newsrooms could quickly and easily obtain pro bono legal support if they faced a First Amendment challenge, because there was an ecosystem “that was active and supportive for all these rights.” That ecosystem was already in shambles before Trump’s executive orders, he said.

“Trump’s order is just simply a frontal attack. Small news organizations simply cannot find the strong voices without the assurances that they have strong legal representation,” Bralow warned.

Abrams said that, compared to the present, the attacks on law firms he saw decades ago when he represented The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers era were “almost minor league.” Under former President Richard Nixon, for example, “There were real threats about the press” like Espionage Act prosecutions, he said, but “never anything like what we’re seeing today.”

“I can’t think of another public elected official that’s ever gone down this road,” he said of Trump.

While some law firms are challenging Trump in court, others aren’t. Abrams believes that, despite the risks, those capitulating to him should be counterattacking instead.

"This is not an effort to clean the legal landscape,” Abrams said of Trump’s actions. “It is to punish entities that he views as enemies.”

Albert is optimistic that Trump’s executive orders will continue to fail to withstand judicial scrutiny. “Judges, I think, have been receptive to the law firms’ arguments that these executive orders are unconstitutional,” Albert said.

Nonprofits, including some that are news organizations, also face significant risks. Trump has broadened the scope of his attacks to these institutions, threatening to revoke their tax-exempt statuses for taking positions or reporting stories he disagrees with.

“I don’t know how you can be a nonprofit that is trying to do right by its community, its employees, and the nation without having real significant concern right now for the sort of retaliation, the sort of the rhetoric that is coming out of the administration,” Bralow said.

He discussed how The Intercept, which is a nonprofit, has worked to “button up” and “Trump-proof” the organization. The Intercept is also helping others, including by relaunching the Press Freedom Defense Fund, which gives money to small newsrooms to address legal threats.

Abrams said that while law firms deserve a share of the criticism, we shouldn’t lose sight of who the villain is in this story. “One thing has to be clear: This is all the president’s fault,” Abrams said. “There is no equality of blame here.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Ed Martin, interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, has mostly been in the news lately for palling around with white supremacists. But he has also spent his career, including his current tenure as D.C.’s interim top prosecutor, making a mockery of the ethical and professional rules governing attorneys, while threatening the rule of law in the nation’s capital and beyond.

That’s why on Wednesday, Demand Progress and Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) filed a comprehensive complaint, more than 20 pages long, with the Office of Disciplinary Counsel for the District of Columbia Bar, laying out a myriad of actions and decisions that clash with the ethics rules governing attorneys by Martin, who calls his public office “President Trumps’ [sic] lawyers.”

News broke on Thursday that President Donald Trump will pull Martin’s nomination for the permanent U.S. attorney post, but Trump said he still plans to find a place for Martin at the Department of Justice.

Emily Peterson-Cassin, director of corporate power at Demand Progress, said, “Ed Martin is a grave threat to civil liberties and the rule of law, so any news indicating that he will no longer be President Trump’s legal point man in D.C. is good news for the nation. But this threat is far from over. Martin’s long, documented history of shamelessly playing politics with the rule of law should disqualify him from working anywhere in government, let alone the Justice Department. We call on President Trump to keep Martin far away from any position of power, especially one that requires sound legal judgment, and nominate someone for U.S. attorney for D.C. that actually respects the rule of law and Americans’ constitutional rights.”

Freedom of the Press Foundation Director of Advocacy Seth Stern said, “Martin’s antics, including his habit of sending bogus letters and tweets to intimidate people exercising First Amendment rights and his threats to target news outlets President Trump dislikes, should disqualify him from practicing law, full stop. We’re relieved that he won’t get the U.S. attorney job, but he should not be able to work for the government in any capacity, or to trade on his shameful interim tenure to find a cushy law firm job and further damage the legal profession.”

Martin’s shady behavior detailed in the complaint includes, among other things, frivolous threats against critics of Trump and Elon Musk, baseless partisan investigations into constitutionally protected statements by Democratic lawmakers, and public threats, made without legal basis or probable cause, to investigate targets whom he acknowledges have committed no crime.

The complaint also discusses his lack of credibility and candor while under oath during the U.S. Senate confirmation process for his U.S. attorney nomination, which includes his misleading turnabout on his disturbing connections to Nazi sympathizers and his pattern of failing to disclose hundreds of appearances on far-right and Russian-controlled media outlets. It lays out Martin’s history of serious lapses in ethical and professional judgment outside the national spotlight, as an attorney and politician in Missouri, to show that Martin’s disregard for the integrity of his profession is a long-standing problem that is unlikely to change.

The complaint asks the Disciplinary Counsel to investigate Martin’s conduct and to impose sanctions up to and including disbarment. It also urges the D.C. Bar to act promptly given the ongoing serious threat Martin’s ability to practice law poses.

You can read the complaint here. Please contact us if you would like further comment, or contact Eric Naing from Demand Progress at eric@demandprogress.org

President Donald Trump’s recent announcement that he plans to impose a 100% tariff on movies made outside the United States has created more confusion than the ending of “Inception.”

But there are two important questions no one seems to be asking. Namely: What in the world is Trump talking about when he claims that making movies outside the U.S. is a national security threat? And why should anyone — let alone any court — ever take this administration seriously again when it claims national security is endangered?

In his Truth Social post about the movie tariff, Trump makes two main arguments (if you can call them that) based on national security. Both are completely unjustified.

First, he claims that the U.S. filmmaking industry is being “devastated” by other nations trying to lure moviemakers to their countries. “This is a concerted effort by other Nations,” he wrote, “and, therefore, a National Security threat.”

But economic harm doesn’t necessarily mean national security harm. While it may mean less money for parts of the American film industry, filming “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” in Norway doesn’t make us less secure. Plus tariffs are a nonsensical way to safeguard national security — foreign adversaries can attack us as long as they pay a fine?

Also, some movies simply must be made outside the U.S. The last three winners of the Academy Award for Best Documentary — “No Other Land,” “20 Days in Mariupol,” and “Navalny” — were all filmed outside the U.S. because they told stories from outside the U.S. Slapping movies like those with tariffs will make them more expensive and less likely to be made or shown in the U.S., depriving Americans of important perspectives about what’s going on in the rest of the world.

Trump’s second national security argument is that foreign-made movies are “in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!” It’s a rich claim, given Hollywood’s history exporting U.S. propaganda and present-day examples of links between U.S. films and U.S. interests.

Trump’s national security claims are just like the movies: all smoke and mirrors.

It’s also essentially the same argument used by both Trump and former President Joe Biden to justify the TikTok ban, i.e., that foreign-made mass media threatens national security by exposing Americans to foreign propaganda. The Supreme Court got it wrong in upholding the TikTok ban. But it applied a lower level of First Amendment scrutiny to the law based on TikTok’s special characteristics, including its collection of vast amounts of data. That leniency shouldn’t apply to a tariff or other law that burdens speech simply because it’s created outside the U.S.

And have you noticed that we haven’t heard much about the app’s supposed massive threat to our national security lately? That’s because Trump no longer wants to ban it, now that he’s amassed millions of followers there and met with the Republican megadonor who also owns part of TikTok. The social platform continues to operate in the U.S., and somehow our national security has remained intact.

This all goes to show that, just like many other purported national security concerns, “propaganda” is simply a convenient argument for an administration to invoke when it suits its purposes and to discard when it doesn’t. Other administrations have also invoked national security when convenient to avoid hard questions or uncomfortable truths. But Trump is taking it to a whole new level.

According to Trump, almost anything can be justified by citing national security: deporting students who write op-eds critical of Israel in college newspapers, refusing to tell a judge what time U.S. planes carrying migrants took off, even attacking Greenland.

Most concerningly for journalists and their sources, the Trump administration has also launched numerous leak investigations and rolled back protections for journalists’ records, all in the name of national security. But documents released to Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) via the Freedom of Information Act show that the reporting the administration cited to justify its crackdown on leaks to reporters did not threaten our national security as claimed.

Instead, they exposed that the administration’s justification for invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans to El Salvador was rejected by American intelligence agencies. When Trump claims to be protecting the homeland from foreign adversaries he is often actually protecting his own false narratives from domestic scrutiny.

Many of these national security claims will be challenged in court, and all of them should be weighed skeptically in the court of public opinion. Given this administration’s track record, judges and the public must remember that Trump’s national security claims are just like the movies: all smoke and mirrors.

The Department of Justice is trying to make it easier for President Donald Trump to lie to the American public under the guise of cracking down on leaks.

On April 25, the DOJ announced the reversal of an internal policy that protected journalists from federal prosecutors seizing their records or forcing them to name their confidential sources. In a memo announcing the change, Attorney General Pam Bondi decried leaks that “undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people,” calling them “illegal and wrong.” The new policy was released May 1.

But the DOJ’s priority seems less about protecting the public and more about shielding the Trump administration from scrutiny. The news stories Bondi’s memo cited to justify the change don’t undermine or victimize anyone besides dishonest officials. They reported exactly the kind of news the American people deserve to know, and the administration would rather keep hidden.

In one footnote, Bondi’s memo links to reporting by The Washington Post and The New York Times about Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans that officials claim are members of the Tren de Aragua gang. Trump claims that the act provides a legal basis for the deportations because Tren de Aragua is invading the U.S. at the direction of the Venezuelan government.

The reporting, however, revealed that this isn’t true — not according to Trump’s own spy agencies, at least. Based on information from confidential sources, the Post and the Times reported that U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the gang is not directed by Venezuela’s government or committing crimes in the United States on its orders.

Another footnote in the memo links to a Reuters news story reporting that Dan Caldwell, an aide to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, had been put on leave as part of a Department of Defense leaks investigation. According to Axios, Caldwell and another official were suspended as part of an investigation into the leak of plans for a secret Pentagon briefing for Elon Musk on China. Although Trump denied the reporting as “fake news,” the embarrassing leak reportedly led him to personally ax the briefing.

The DOJ’s priority seems less about protecting the public and more about shielding the Trump administration from scrutiny.

Other recent news reports based on information from confidential sources within the government are in the same vein: embarrassing to the Trump administration, but not a threat to national security.

The Times, for instance, recently used information from confidential sources to report that Hegseth — already under scrutiny for Signalgate 1.0 — shared “detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen” in a second private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother, and lawyer. Days later, The Post reported, again based on confidential sources, that Hegseth had Signal installed on a desktop computer in his Pentagon office.

These news reports raise important and legitimate questions about Hegseth’s ability to protect confidential government information. Yet while the Trump administration has steadfastly refused to hold Hegseth accountable for lapses that could result in the very kind of leaks that damage national security that Bondi condemns, it’s eager to prosecute whistleblowers. Changing the DOJ policy on legal demands to journalists is an important step in this campaign.

Bondi’s memo followed a request announced the previous day by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for the DOJ to investigate leaks to the press. In the past, the DOJ has jailed or threatened to jail journalists who refused to name their confidential sources, and has secretly subpoenaed their phone and email records to search for their sources, sometimes while ignoring past internal policies.

But as bad as that track record is, this isn’t just a return to the status quo as of a few years ago, before the Biden administration enacted the policy Bondi repealed. This new one will be wielded by the most anti-press administration in American history, headed by a President who has called for journalists to be jailed and raped for refusing to name sources. Platitudes about press freedom are irrelevant in an administration that flouts Supreme Court rulings and is unlikely to be constrained by the precise wording of an internal policy.

Bondi’s mischaracterizations of leaks during Trump 2.0 can’t change that whistleblowers remain essential to the ability of the press to tell Americans the truth, rather than simply what the government wants us to know. From legendary Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg to Edward Snowden to countless others whose names we may never know, whistleblowers have been at the heart of some of the most important news stories in American history.

Trump wants to lie to us with impunity. Journalists and whistleblowers are one of the few things standing in his way.

While the Trump administration’s change to DOJ policy makes it riskier for journalists to do their jobs and for sources to expose officials’ lies, corruption, and crimes, undoubtedly many brave reporters and whistleblowers will continue to do just that.

They should be smart, and take steps to protect their digital and physical security. For example, SecureDrop, an open source whistleblower submission system from Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), allows for anonymous sharing of documents and tips.

But in the face of pervasive surveillance and an administration intent on identifying them, it’s possible the DOJ could unmask even the smartest and most careful sources. In that case, it will be up to the public to loudly and forcefully fight back against the Trump administration’s attempts to prosecute sources or the journalists who refuse to give up their names.

The public will only do that if it understands what press freedom means to our democracy and how severely attacks on journalist-source confidentiality can harm accountability. And that’ll only happen if journalists and editorial boards cover attacks on press freedom regularly and aggressively. The days of journalists not wanting to “make themselves the story” need to end – journalists aren’t making themselves the story, the administration is.

Trump wants to lie to us with impunity. Journalists and whistleblowers are one of the few things standing in his way. If the administration starts throwing them in jail — as the new DOJ policy will make it easier to do — we all must stand up for them.

This is the third in a series of profiles of independent journalists who use public records to hold local governments accountable. The second, about Hannah Bassett of the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, is here. The first, about Lisa Pickoff-White of the California Reporting Project, is here.

Michelle Pitcher knows a little something about the Texas criminal justice system.

The criminal justice reporter with the Texas Observer, who previously contributed to Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting at The Marshall Project, grew up in Dallas with family members incarcerated by the state.

But while Pitcher's investigative work gives her — and her readership — insight into the impact the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has on the lives of millions of Texans, it’s a complex that typically functions in the dark.

“I think that the system wouldn’t work without secrecy, or at least that’s the idea behind a lot of the actions and policies that happen in Texas prisons,” Pitcher said.

As a journalism master’s student at the University of California-Berkeley, Pitcher worked with The Marshall Project, which focuses exclusively on criminal justice and prisons reporting, on a Pulitzer-Prize winning story about the use of police dogs. “Ever since then, I’ve realized it’s really fulfilling and the area that I’m passionate about for personal and professional reasons,” Pitcher added.

But that doesn’t make the work any easier.

Access to public records in Texas is often blocked by officials hiding behind broad security and privacy excuses, making it difficult for journalists and the public alike to ask questions and get answers. Even when records requests are ultimately not denied, delays can still obstruct newsgathering.

“Even if the attorney general’s office ultimately decides I should get those records, months have passed,” Pitcher said.

But to Pitcher, these obstacles are just that — she’ll follow records requests for a year if she has to, or visit public information officers all over the state in person to obtain the information she needs.

“These laws and policies are in place to make it explicitly difficult to get answers to questions to see what’s going on,” Pitcher said. “If you request documents, there are dozens of exceptions that prison officials can cite.”

Officials often just raise blanket security concerns. “A lot of it is up to the warden’s discretion, too,” Pitcher added. “It’s all very tight-lipped by design.”

To fill in the gaps left by a lack of access to records, Pitcher relies on incarcerated people to tell their stories and show the public what is happening behind closed doors.

"These laws and policies are in place to make it explicitly difficult to get answers"

“People are very brave and very willing to talk, knowing that it’s not going to be a secret and still willing to talk on the record,” Pitcher said. “As journalists, we should be seeking the people who are willing to tell those stories, because no one wants to feel like they’re shouting into the abyss. And people are shouting. People do want to talk.”

That said, the state prison makes it difficult for journalists to access the people incarcerated within the system, prohibiting journalists from interviewing the same person more than once within 90 days and limiting visits to an hour.

Pitcher uses her reporting to push past barriers — monitoring of emails and letters to incarcerated sources, guards and escorts present during media visits at prisons, incarcerated people moved across facilities — so she can inform the community.

“I’ve had it happen on multiple occasions where I was supposed to interview someone at a unit three hours away, and the day before the interview [they’re] at a different unit five hours away now,” Pitcher said. Although she has the geographical flexibility to follow her sources and navigate delay tactics, she says that is unfortunately “not possible for a lot of newsrooms” in the state.

Last year, Pitcher co-authored a story about the 200-year-long history of prison labor in Texas that pieced together prison reports, testimony, court filings, interviews of incarcerated people, and more to uncover the working conditions and death rates of these prison-run farms — some of which continue operating today.

To obtain these records, Pitcher and her team combined their reporting strategies and combed through the archives at the state libraries, filed records requests, and interviewed incarcerated individuals who had been injured while working.

Despite the obstacles in accessing information about current events in the prison system, Pitcher said that “Texas has a terrible history, and it’s all documented at the state libraries.”

“We had past, we had present, and we had official reports,” Pitcher said. “We had anecdotes, we had data. And it was just so rewarding to be able to put together a full picture.”

Although receiving her master’s in journalism helped shape her career path and train her in public records-seeking, Pitcher emphasized that anybody who wants to find out more about our government can request public records and report on them.

“As journalists, we have no real special rights or powers,” Pitcher said. “We are just members of the public who are availing ourselves of public record laws. All you have to do to be a journalist is do journalism with ethics.”

For more on this topic, see our two-part series on covering the mass incarceration system.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

This week, we take a look back at Trump 2.0’s first 100 days — and catch us live May 2, 2025, at 1 p.m. Eastern time for a discussion on the administration’s unprecedented attack on law firms and what they mean for the press. 

100 days, 100 attacks on the press, and counting

The second Trump administration’s 100th day came and went this week, but the attacks on the press and transparency kept coming. 

Our U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has a recap of some of the major press freedom violations it’s documented so far. We also put together a list of 100 times President Donald Trump and his team targeted the Fourth Estate. Here it is on Bluesky and X. 

It’s alarming how easy it was to get to that number. Before the ink dried, there were a couple more, including Trump’s ludicrous threat to sue The New York Times for “tortious interference” for quoting legal experts on the weakness of his frivolous shakedown of a lawsuit against CBS News. 

And to combat the excessive secrecy that defined this administration’s first few months, we also launched The Classified Catalog, a secrecy news tracker to help the public hold the government accountable. 

Department of Justice repeals protections for journalist-source confidentiality

Attorney General Pam Bondi has rescinded her predecessor’s policy restricting federal prosecutors from forcing journalists to reveal sources. 

As Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Director of Advocacy Seth Stern said, “Everyone predicted this would happen in a second Trump administration, yet politicians in a position to prevent it prioritized empty rhetoric over putting up a meaningful fight.” Read our full statement. 

Using public records to break through the secrecy of the Texas prison system

Our series highlighting local journalists using public records to speak truth to power continues with a profile of Michelle Pitcher, a reporter at the Texas Observer who focuses on criminal justice.

Public records alone can’t tell the story, though — only those living it can. “As journalists, we should be seeking the people who are willing to tell those stories because no one wants to feel like they’re shouting into the abyss. And people are shouting. People do want to talk,” Pitcher said. Read more here. 

Rural America needs public media

We partnered with Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the Committee to Protect Journalists to lead a letter urging congressional leadership to reject the White House’s request to rescind funds appropriated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. 

The letter explains that “the harm of these cuts will disproportionately befall rural American communities. Less densely populated parts of the country tend to have fewer options for reliable news sources. ... When people lose access to their local media, they’re forced to turn instead to national media, which are less attuned to the needs of their communities.” Read the letter here.  

What we’re reading

100 days of attacks on transparency and the press (The Dissenter). FPF’s Seth Stern and Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy Lauren Harper joined The Dissenter’s podcast to talk about the state of press freedom and transparency 100 days into Trump 2.0. 

Alarm bells: Trump’s first 100 days ramp up fear for the press, democracy (Committee to Protect Journalists). “I really think we’re just beginning to understand the impact of, for example, removing the AP’s access, and what that will do to local news organizations,” said Kirstin McCudden, Managing Editor of our U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. 

Trump’s war on the press: 10 numbers from the US President’s first 100 days (Reporters Without Borders ). RSF lays out 10 key numbers that illustrate the administration’s unconstitutional assaults on press freedom and the right to reliable information.

Trump v. 60 Minutes is a stunning battle for the soul of US media (The Guardian). “In addition to all the principled reasons to not cave to Trump, there’s also the practical one that it doesn’t work,” Stern explained to The Guardian. “He will be right back at your door with his hands out the next day.”

Democrats had a shot at protecting journalists from Trump. They blew it (The Intercept). “Last year, Senate Democrats had a clear opportunity to make basic protections for journalists a matter of binding federal law, rather than mere policy that could be undone with a vendetta-laced memo … then Democratic leaders blew it.” 

The legal battle for DOGE transparency (Columbia Journalism Review). “More transparency means less corruption and potential for state capture. It’s an existential issue, and not one that our federal records laws or the people in the bureaucracy are equipped to deal with,” Harper told CJR.

US attorney for DC accuses Wikipedia of ‘propaganda,’ threatens nonprofit status (The Washington Post). Practically everything Ed Martin says is nonsense, but the one thing that’s totally believable is he doesn’t know federal prosecutors don’t investigate nonprofits’ tax compliance. 

Attorney General Pam Bondi has reportedly rescinded her predecessor’s policy restricting federal prosecutors from forcing journalists to reveal their sources. Her memo follows news that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard asked the Department of Justice to investigate recent leaks to reporters.

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Director of Advocacy Seth Stern said:

“Every Democrat who put the PRESS Act on the back burner when they had the opportunity to pass a bipartisan bill codifying journalist-source confidentiality should be ashamed. Everyone predicted this would happen in a second Trump administration, yet politicians in a position to prevent it prioritized empty rhetoric over putting up a meaningful fight.

Because of them, a president who threatens journalists with prison rape for protecting their sources and says reporting critically on his administration should be illegal can and almost certainly will abuse the legal system to investigate and prosecute his critics and the journalists they talk to.”

The PRESS Act, which would have prohibited the government from compelling journalists to burn sources except in life-or-death emergencies, twice passed the House unanimously.

It had bipartisan support in the Senate, including from Republican co-sponsors Sen. Mike Lee and Sen. Lindsey Graham. It was endorsed by everyone from the New York Times editorial board to former Fox News journalist Catherine Herridge.

Yet it spent months stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee, despite the best efforts of Lee and co-sponsor Sen. Ron Wyden to move it forward. Then, President Donald Trump was elected and instructed Republicans to kill the bill in a Truth Social post.

The Biden administration also deserves blame, not only for failing to vocally support the PRESS Act but for the bogus criminal theories it pursued against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Florida journalist Tim Burke under the Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, respectively. Biden’s validation of those theories provides Trump with significant leverage against journalists who publish secrets provided by sources.

The only good news is that those prosecutions – as well as Trump and others’ insistence that routine journalism should be illegal – opens a door for journalists who are subpoenaed to invoke the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. That would effectively dare Trump’s administration to grant immunity to reporters he calls “enemies of the people.”

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

Here’s what we’re focused on this week, as officials across America continue their attacks on the free press.

Administration must release memos on abduction of op-ed writer

Secretary of State Marco Rubio claims the authority to unilaterally declare students who protest the Israel-Gaza war antisemites and terrorism supporters in order to kick them out of the country. 

So when even Rubio’s State Department doubts the government has grounds to deport a student — especially an anti-war student from the Middle East — the administration’s position must be exceptionally weak. In the case of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, it is. According to The Washington Post, internal government memos admit that the only “evidence” against her was her co-authoring an op-ed criticizing the war and that, to state the obvious, this evidence is legally insufficient to justify deportation. 

The administration needs to make these memos public. Read more here.

Journalist targeted by Trump 1.0 discusses Trump 2.0

When The Associated Press didn’t bow to President Donald Trump’s demand to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” he barred the news service from events in the Oval Office and on Air Force One. And when a judge deemed that decision unconstitutional, he spiked the permanent press pool slot for wire services entirely.

This (un)constitutional experiment started in his first term, when he revoked the credentials of individual journalists he disliked, including Brian Karem, a former White House correspondent who covered Trump for Playboy.

Karem spoke about that experience and today’s press restrictions in a webinar hosted by Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) last week. He was joined by Caitlin Vogus, senior adviser at FPF, and Stephanie Sugars, who regularly reports on issues of press access to the White House as senior reporter for the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of FPF. You can watch and read about the conversation here.

Investigating Medicaid fraud through public records 

Our series on local journalists who use public-records-based reporting to make a difference continues with a profile of Hannah Bassett, who helped expose a deadly Medicaid fraud scheme targeting Native American communities in Arizona. 

“In Arizona, the public records statute allows for the state agencies to claim an exemption if a record is in the state’s interest to withhold,” Bassett explained. “It’s understandable that some information coming out might not be in an agency’s interest, but that doesn’t mean it’s not in the public’s interest.”

Read more about Bassett and her reporting here.

Streisand wouldn’t let the U.S. government rain on Ellsberg’s parade

Happy birthday to Barbra Streisand, whose 1973 fundraiser kept our co-founder Daniel Ellsberg’s legal fight alive long enough for him to win.

“Indirectly, that ability to keep the trial going and his case getting kicked led to the whole uncovering of the Watergate scandal, which led to the downfall of Nixon, which led to him not dropping nuclear weapons on Vietnam,” documentarian Paul Jay told the Hollywood Reporter after Ellsberg died in 2023. 

She kept Ellsberg out of jail for leaking the Pentagon Papers; now we’re continuing his fight to defend whistleblowers.

What we’re reading

Keep Texas free speech strong. Leave anti-SLAPP laws alone (Houston Chronicle). Two bills before the Texas Legislature would undermine critical protections against frivolous lawsuits by the powerful to censor their critics. Lawmakers need to listen to the bipartisan backlash and reject the bills.

Judge declines AP challenge to new White House press pool policy, but says time will tell whether wire service still gets “second class treatment” (Deadline). Any judge willing to put blinders on to presume this administration is acting in “good faith” is unfit for this moment, and probably any moment. The one thing the administration has been transparent about is its bad-faith motives for retaliating against the Associated Press.

Police officers who joined Jan. 6 rally ask Supreme Court for anonymity (The Washington Post). It sounds like the requester could just copy the officers’ brief on why their identities shouldn’t be disclosed and recaption it as a brief on why their identities should be disclosed. The First Amendment does not protect public officials from being embarrassed by their unpopular opinions. 

FCC chair threatens Comcast licenses for alleged ‘news distortion’ (U.S. Press Freedom Tracker). Legally speaking, the idea of punishing reporting critical of the president’s policies as outside the “public interest” is laughable. But unfortunately we have an FCC chair who traded in his law books for a Trump lapel pin.

As in DC, a fight breaks out in Washington state over who gets access to lawmakers (Investigate West). We told Investigate West that “Now that there are so many independent journalists out there, politicians are taking it upon themselves to be the judge of who is and isn’t a journalist.”

Here’s how to share sensitive leaks with the press.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio claims the authority to unilaterally declare students who protest the Israel-Gaza war antisemites and terrorism supporters in order to kick them out of the country.

So when even Rubio’s State Department doubts the government has grounds to deport a student — especially an anti-war student from the Middle East — the administration’s position must be exceptionally weak. In the case of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, it is. The only known “evidence” against her was her co-authoring an op-ed criticizing the war and calling for Tufts to divest from Israeli investments.

According to The Washington Post, the department issued a memo reaching one of the most obvious conclusions in the history of memos – that the Department of Homeland Security’s claim that Öztürk acted “in support of Hamas,” and therefore could be thrown out of the country, is baseless.

Yet the public hasn’t seen that key document about Öztürk, who was abducted by plainclothes federal agents in March and is currently in an immigration jail in Louisiana. The Post’s source was only able to “describe” the memo’s content to journalists.

Nor has the public seen another memo, also reported by the Post, from DHS official Andre Watson to senior State Department official John Armstrong, accusing Öztürk of “anti-Israel activism” with “adverse policy consequences for the United States.” Tellingly, the only example provided by Watson, according to the Post, was the aforementioned op-ed.

These two documents expose the frivolousness of the administration’s case against Öztürk, which is central to one of the most important public debates in America, now and possibly ever. And it’s alarming that whether the government can incarcerate and expel non-citizens (and maybe citizens) who express ideas it doesn’t like qualifies as a “debate” these days.

Federal courts up to the Supreme Court have shot down the administration’s due process-free deportation practices. Some of President Donald Trump’s closest supporters, both in Congress and popular culture, are breaking from his rhetoric on this issue, recognizing the obvious dangers of persecuting nonviolent anti-war speech. Journalists everywhere are self-censoring and pulling stories out of fear of being thrown in jail cells from Louisiana to El Salvador.

A country that expels op-ed writers and hides government records about why simply does not have freedom of the press.

Last week, Federal Communications Commission Chair and shameless Trump lapdog Brendan Carr (the guy wears a golden bust of Trump as a lapel pin) threatened to investigate news outlets that doubt the administration’s false narratives or don’t air all of its spin sessions. Predictably, a Trump-aligned organization filed an FCC complaint echoing Carr’s nonsense.

All that is to say, it’s a big deal that even the State Department knows the administration is wrong. The existence and substance of the two memos have already been reported, so the cat is out of the bag — there is no basis for secrecy. There never was. And there is little risk of tainting a future jury pool — Öztürk can only dream of that kind of due process.

In any event, now that the memos have been disclosed, it’s hard to argue that the public is better off with a potentially incomplete news report than with the entire documents. But this is an administration that believes questioning its infallibility is contrary to the “public interest.”

That’s not how officials who are confident in the accuracy of their facts and the soundness of their legal arguments behave. The administration needs to be prepared to defend its (indefensible) views on free expression, not hide from them. If it claims the First Amendment tolerates throwing people out of the country for using news ink to express political beliefs shared by millions, it needs to be transparent, including about why it overruled internal dissent.

We’ve filed Freedom of Information Act requests for both memos. We know the administration is likely to deny those requests, and we’re prepared to put up a fight there and anywhere else we see an opportunity to force some transparency out of this lawless administration.

As a press freedom organization, there’s no other option. A country that expels op-ed writers and hides government records about why simply does not have freedom of the press.

This is the second in a series of profiles of independent journalists who use public records to hold local governments accountable. The first, about Lisa Pickoff-White of the California Reporting Project, is available here.

When enterprise and investigative reporter Hannah Bassett arrived in Arizona to report for the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, she was looking forward to helping the public understand some of the statewide health disparities affecting local communities through her stories. Just a few weeks into her beat, Bassett filed the first of many public records requests that helped piece together one of the largest Medicaid fraud campaigns in modern U.S. history.

Bassett’s story investigated a deadly scheme created by behavioral health providers who fraudulently billed Arizona’s Medicaid agency for services never provided. The scheme targeted Native American individuals by exploiting a Medicaid plan for which only American Indians and Alaska Natives are eligible, interrupting services and leaving health care and sober living homes with little to no regulation or oversight, with tragic results.

“It was apparent pretty early on that there was going to be a lot of unprecedented elements to this, in terms of what the public records showed,” said Bassett. “They showed there were signs early on that staff noticed and tried to report up escalating claims, which was sort of a canary in the coal mine, and that something wasn’t working.”

Requesting and collecting public records for Bassett’s story was a team effort. Bassett and her colleagues had to refine and amend multiple requests to get a response from the government. Eventually, Bassett said it felt like the Medicaid agency was dragging its feet, so she enlisted the help of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to send a demand letter and ultimately obtain records that pieced together a timeline.

“It’s understandable that some information coming out might not be in an agency’s interest, but that doesn’t mean it’s not in the public’s interest.”

“In Arizona, the public records statute allows for the state agencies to claim an exemption if a record is in the state’s interest to withhold,” Bassett said. “It’s understandable that some information coming out might not be in an agency’s interest, but that doesn’t mean it’s not in the public’s interest.”

Investigative reporting isn’t just about public records — it’s about trust. To build that trust among the Native communities she was covering, Bassett shadowed local Indigenous advocates in their outreach to individuals facing housing and food insecurity and leaned on her reporting partner, Mary Hudetz, who provided an essential perspective as an Indigenous person herself. Weaving Hudetz’s public records reporting on the death toll in these communities with the internal agency records Bassett obtained helped humanize and ground the story for readers.

“If it were just my line of reporting, that would have been really dry and hard for people to latch on to,” Bassett said. “Ultimately, being able to come out with that story that felt very complete with both sides and having stuck on the story long enough to get those records felt like a real win.”

Bassett’s interest in journalism piqued after a narrative and documentary class her senior year of college. She ultimately decided to pursue a reporting career and received her master’s degree from Stanford University’s journalism program, which puts emphasis on using data to tell stories.

“I was trying to find that balance of writing about issues that I felt were in the public’s interest, trying to break down complex policy matters to help the public understand what that meant on a more individual or community level,” Bassett said. “I had experience using public records requests already, and knowing how to use some programming languages and data analysis skills was going to help me know what to do with big sets of government data that I might get from an agency.”

Bassett is now based in Burlington, Vermont, where she covers the state legislature for an alternative, independent newspaper, Seven Days.

When The Associated Press didn’t bow to President Donald Trump’s demand to refer to the Gulf of Mexico solely as the “Gulf of America,” he barred the news service from events in the Oval Office and on Air Force One. And when a judge determined that Trump’s decision to do so was unconstitutional, he spiked the permanent press pool slot for wire services entirely.

These decisions to shun newsrooms may sound like the product of a tantrum — and they are — but there is also a pattern at play: Trump is testing the limits of the First Amendment.

This (un)constitutional experiment started in his first term, when he revoked the credentials of individual journalists he disliked. One of them was Brian Karem, a former White House correspondent who covered Trump for Playboy.

Karem spoke about that experience and today’s press restrictions in a webinar hosted by Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) on April 16, 2025. He was joined by Caitlin Vogus, senior adviser at FPF, and Stephanie Sugars, who regularly reports on issues of press access to the White House as senior reporter for the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of FPF.

Karem, who successfully sued the Trump administration three separate times to get his press pass reinstated, emphasized that Trump’s denial of access to the AP is also a broader attack on wire services like Reuters and Bloomberg. Cash-strapped local newsrooms often rely on wire reporting to fill pages and inform readers, which is much harder to do when those services are sidelined.

“The whole point of this is to limit those who will ask questions that Donald Trump doesn’t want to answer,” Karem said during the webinar. “The effect, of course, for people across the country, is a slanted view of the news.”

In cherry-picking who can cover him, Trump is restricting access to the White House to only those willing to stoop to his demands, Sugars said.

“It’s alarming when you see all of these things in conjunction with each other and just how effectively this administration is taking steps to ensure that the only message that is getting out is one that they approve of,” she said.

The consequences are grave, including less-experienced journalists in the press room and fewer outlets reporting on the administration with the required scrutiny, Karem said. That enables Trump to hide more from the American public, which is therefore less equipped to hold him accountable.

“Donald Trump is asking, ‘Who are you with? What company are you with?’ because he wants to know so he can come back and say, ‘Oh, I like you.’” Karem said. “He has turned himself into a dictator with sycophants asking him questions.”

Trump’s effort to exert control over the press extends to major networks, too, Sugars said. Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, has opened investigations into outlets including NPR, PBS, CBS, ABC, and NBC, and the Trump administration recently gutted the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America.

“It’s been a bit of an onslaught and coming from a lot of different angles, from within the White House, the Trump administration, and his allies more generally in Congress,” Sugars said.

While Trump is the most vocal anti-press president in recent memory, Karem said he isn’t the first to retaliate against journalists and their sources. He noted that Barack Obama used the Espionage Act nearly a dozen times to target whistleblowers.

“I have covered every president since Ronald Reagan. Every one of them has been complicit and guilty about destroying the First Amendment, free speech, and destroying our ability to use confidential sources,” Karem said. “Donald Trump is merely a symptom of the problem.”

Restriction and intimidation aren’t excuses for the press to throw in the towel. Karem said that newsrooms must find other ways to retrieve vetted factual information, which he described as “the coin of the realm.”

If they can’t access a press briefing or pool reporting seat, reporters can still focus on sourcing, building deeper relationships with those on their beats, and gathering information from people and places where restrictions don’t apply, Karem said.

“You’ve got to stand up to a bully,” he added. “There is nothing that is more antithetical to the idea of free press, free speech, and speaking truth to power than the moves that Donald Trump has made in his second administration.”

Perhaps the most famous adage of journalism — get the truth and print it — continues to face attacks in our courts, and judges often fail to stop them.

A recent case comes from Victoria County, Texas, where last month a judge entered a temporary order preventing the publication of a book about alleged sexual harassment by former Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society director Rod Risley.

The court lifted the order on April 8, but only after the honor society had stopped the book from being published on the first day of its national convention, when it would have had the greatest impact.

Phi Theta Kappa, which sought the restraining order against author Toni Marek, hadn’t claimed that the information in her book is false. By its own admission, Marek received the information legally, either through public records requests or by speaking to former employees. But the honor society argued that the book shouldn’t be published because information in it is “confidential.” A judge initially agreed.

This isn’t the only order barring publication, known as a prior restraint, that Phi Theta Kappa has sought in recent times and won.

In a separate lawsuit, Phi Theta Kappa obtained an order prohibiting the competing HonorSociety.org from speaking about it online. Among other things, the order forbade HonorSociety.org from editing Phi Theta Kappa’s Wikipedia page or publishing independent reporting on Risley, regardless of whether those edits or publications were true.

A federal court of appeals recently struck down the order as overly broad.

The initial decisions granting the ban on Marek’s book and the gag on HonorSociety.org both suffer from the same glaring problem: the First Amendment.

The First Amendment prohibits prior restraints in all but the most extreme circumstances. In 1971, the Supreme Court even rebuffed the government’s attempt to stop the press from publishing the Pentagon Papers, documents the government claimed contained state secrets that could harm national security.

Censorship orders harm our freedom of speech no matter how long they last.

The Court has also repeatedly affirmed the First Amendment right to publish lawfully obtained, truthful information on matters of public concern.

But even though these censorship orders are supposed to be extremely rare and are almost always unconstitutional, prior restraints seem to be persisting.

One reason may be that judges are failing to recognize the First Amendment interests at stake when someone asks for a prior restraint on an "emergency" basis, as Phi Theta Kappa did in the case of Marek’s book. Because the honor society sought a temporary restraining order, Marek didn’t have a chance to appear in court and argue her side before the judge entered the initial order banning publication.

This isn’t a problem isolated to Texas. In February, a Mississippi court ordered The Clarksdale Press Register to remove an editorial criticizing Democratic Mayor Chuck Espy’s office for failing to properly notify the public of a special meeting, as required by state law. The city government claimed the editorial was defamatory, even though the city clerk admitted in an affidavit that she had failed to follow the notification law.

First Amendment experts immediately condemned the order. But as in Marek’s case, the city sought a temporary restraining order and the court granted it without giving the Press Register a chance to respond to the allegations or raise First Amendment arguments. Only after a national outcry did the city drop its suit and the court lift its censorship order.

Even though courts eventually ended the prior restraints on Marek, HonorSociety.org, and The Clarksdale Press Register, the fact that they entered them at all is a huge problem. Censorship orders harm our freedom of speech no matter how long they last.

It’s also a problem that nobody involved stopped to think about the First Amendment, at least at first. Both lawyers and judges need to do more to protect the constitutional rights of the public and the press.

Every lawyer in America is taught constitutional law, and even the most cursory legal research would turn up Supreme Court precedent on prior restraints. Lawyers seeking prior restraints have an ethical obligation to disclose law that cuts against their case to the court. But far too many emergency requests to censor speech fail to mention even the most well-known First Amendment decisions.

Judges, too, should hear First Amendment alarm bells ringing when they’re asked to restrain speech. When someone seeks an emergency order prohibiting speech, judges shouldn’t simply accept their arguments. They must independently research the law to be sure that their orders don’t violate the Constitution. They also can and should sanction lawyers who fail to mention any of the many cases prohibiting prior restraints.

Giving the proper attention and weight to freedom of speech isn’t too much to ask of our legal system. When lawyers and judges neglect their professional responsibility and neglect the Constitution, we all become vulnerable to censorship.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

Here are this week’s top press freedom stories, plus updates on our work at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF).

A series to spotlight public-records-based local journalism

A major reason why politicians are able to attack the press without much resistance is that the public distrusts the media. And one of the reasons for that distrust is that when people think “journalist,” they often think of partisan cable news pundits rather than the thousands of local investigative reporters serving communities across the country. 

We’re hoping to play a small part in changing that by profiling local journalists who use public records laws to hold local governments accountable (as well as other noteworthy reporters whose work flies under the radar). We’re starting the series this week with a profile of Lisa Pickoff-White, director of the California Reporting Project. CRP pools public records resources so California journalists can benefit from each other’s public records hauls. Read the profile here. 

Unjust law helps muzzle incarcerated journalists

With the Trump administration throwing abductees in shady jails and prisons from Louisiana to El Salvador, it’s essential that incarcerated journalists can expose the conditions they’re dealing with. 

But as incarcerated journalist Jeremy Busby explains in his latest article for FPF, not only do imprisoned journalists face relentless retaliation, they’re also systemically obstructed from seeking recourse from the courts by the Prison Litigation Reform Act. Read more here.

When it comes to issuing prior restraints, courts ‘just do it’ 

A recent decision from a federal appellate court related to the Oregonian’s quest for access to court records in a sexual harassment lawsuit against Nike means journalists who intervene in litigation to unseal court records could subject themselves to “prior restraints,” or judicial orders barring them from reporting news related to the case.

That’s why FPF joined a coalition of media companies and press freedom groups represented by attorneys at Davis Wright Tremaine to file an amicus brief supporting the Oregonian’s request that the full appeals court reconsider this unprecedented decision. Read more here.

An existential threat to congressional investigative powers

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are just two of the officials ignoring congressional requests for information about their agencies. This stonewalling, combined with the mass firings at executive branch Freedom of Information Act offices, represents an existential threat to Congress’ investigative and oversight powers.

Every member should vocally defend FOIA offices. Not doing so could undermine the entire legislative process. Read more here from our Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy Lauren Harper.

What we’re reading 

El Salvador’s president says he won’t return mistakenly deported man to US (NBC News). This is the authoritarian ratchet. If Trump can arbitrarily “disappear” non-citizens in El Salvador, anyone else could be next — including journalists who report on his administration.

No evidence linking Tufts student to antisemitism or terrorism, State Department office found (The Washington Post). Congress must demand the full release of this memo. The administration can’t be allowed to justify abductions and deportations of op-ed writers with vague claims of antisemitism. 

White House moves to limit newswire access after AP lawsuit win (Bloomberg). This will harm local news outlets everywhere, but particularly in rural areas where Trump is popular and cash-strapped newspapers rely on wire services for national stories. 

State terror (Thinking About…). “The first part of controlling the language is inverting the meaning: whatever the government does is good, because by definition then its victims are the ‘criminals’ and the ‘terrorists.’ The second part is deterring the press.”

Trump’s FCC chairman is sporting a gold Trump-head pin, and it’s eerily similar to historical pins from world dictators (Buzzfeed). Trump keeps making ridiculous, illegal demands for the Federal Communications Commission to help him punish his enemies. Don’t hold your breath for the FCC chair to push back — he’s wearing a golden bust of Trump as a lapel pin. 

Mahmoud Khalil’s battle is not over (Jacobin). An immigration judge’s ruling that Mahmoud Khalil can be deported for his pro-Palestinian political speech —  during a hearing in which journalists were once again shut out of the virtual room — sets a dangerous precedent. 

A key fight over the most infamous police project in the country is coming to a head (Slate). A slush fund for corporations to secretly bankroll police projects is arguing against transparency because it might turn people against those projects. That’s absurd. There should be no tolerance for shell games to duck open records obligations.

Five Colorado Springs news outlets scrub their websites of an article about the arrest of former GOP council member (Colorado Times Recorder). Sealing arrest records doesn’t change the fact that someone was arrested. Good for the Colorado Times Recorder for standing up to a former city council member who tried to pressure it into removing an accurate story about her past arrest.

Here’s how to share sensitive leaks with the press.

When journalists at The Oregonian started reporting on a sexual harassment lawsuit against Nike, they knew that sealed documents in the case could provide vital information. Little did they know that going to court to get them could mean undercutting their First Amendment rights.

A recent decision from a federal appellate court related to the Oregonian’s quest for access means that journalists who intervene in court cases to try to unseal court records could subject themselves to “prior restraints,” or judicial orders barring them from reporting news related to the case.

That’s why Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) joined a coalition of media companies and press freedom groups to file an amicus brief supporting the Oregonian’s request that the full appeals court reconsider this unprecedented decision.

Fight for access to Nike lawsuit records

In 2022, The Oregonian moved to unseal certain documents from a lawsuit brought by four former female employees at Nike who claimed the sportswear company fostered a “culture of unequal compensation and sexual harassment.” Of central interest to the news outlet were the individuals named in internal company documents about allegations of discrimination and harassment.

Around the same time, an Oregonian journalist met with the lawyer for the plaintiffs as part of their reporting on the case. During the meeting, the lawyer inadvertently sent the reporter confidential documents from the lawsuit.

It can’t be right that journalists who go to court to vindicate the public’s First Amendment right of access to court records have fewer First Amendment protections than journalists who don’t.

Typically, when journalists receive secret documents, they want to report on them—and the First Amendment protects their right to do so. But in this case, the court ordered The Oregonian to return or destroy the documents and prohibited it from publishing any information obtained from them.

The Oregonian objected, but a panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that the news outlet could be required to return or destroy the documents. The appeals court said that The Oregonian became a party to the case when it intervened in the lawsuit to seek the unsealing of the records and, as a result, it could be restricted from publishing them without violating the First Amendment rights it would enjoy as a nonparty news outlet.

Losing First Amendment rights by exercising them

The Court of Appeals’ decision is yet another example of courts ignoring key precedent on prior restraints. The Supreme Court has made clear time and again that prior restraints can be justified in only the most extreme circumstances.

If the court didn’t approve of a prior restraint on publication of the Pentagon Papers — which the government claims contained national security secrets — it seems obvious that it wouldn’t approve of a prior restraint on documents describing sexual harassment complaints at a shoe company.

But perhaps even more worrying than the court’s ignorance of prior restraint precedent is its position that The Oregonian forfeits its First Amendment right to publish the documents because it intervened in the lawsuit to vindicate another First Amendment right — the right of access to judicial documents.

Journalists move to unseal court records all the time. While the First Amendment gives every member of the public the right to access court records and proceedings, the Supreme Court has specifically noted the special role journalists play in exercising that right and using it to inform the public.

But as the attorneys from Davis Wright Tremaine wrote in the amicus brief we joined, the appeals court’s decision “effectively penalizes news outlets that intervene to unseal court records while also gathering information on the same topic through other reporting methods.”

To understand why this punishes journalists, imagine if The Oregonian had never intervened in the Nike lawsuit to try to unseal documents. If everything else still played out the same — its reporter met with a lawyer and the lawyer inadvertently sent the reporter sealed court records—there would be no question that the reporter would have a First Amendment right to publish those documents.

But if the appeals court’s decision stands, journalists who go to court to unseal documents won’t have the same First Amendment right to publish documents they independently obtain through interviews, public records requests, or even anonymous leaks.

That’s a problem because, as our brief explains, many important news stories, from the Miami Herald’s reporting on the Jeffrey Epstein case to The Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigation of child sexual abuse by the Catholic Church, relied on both unsealing court records and shoe-leather reporting.

It can’t be right that journalists who go to court to vindicate the public’s First Amendment right of access to court records have fewer First Amendment protections than journalists who don’t. The full Court of Appeals must reconsider this case and right this backward decision.

This is the first in a series of profiles of independent journalists who use public records to hold local governments accountable. The second, about Hannah Bassett's investigation of Medicaid fraud in Arizona, is here.

Lisa Pickoff-White fell in love with — and experienced the hurdles of — records reporting as a journalism graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, where she participated in a project to investigate and report on the 2007 murder of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey.

The effort brought together newsrooms to finish Bailey’s reporting on violence and fraud in a San Francisco bakery, which the investigation revealed had long-standing ties with local politicians and police.

“That experience really opened up my eyes to both records reporting and data journalism,” Pickoff-White said. “I realized there was this whole other side of journalism that, even though I had been working in it, that I didn't even really know anything about, and it was something that I was excited to pursue. I immediately was like, ‘This is grueling, difficult work, but it’s work I really want to do.’”

Now, 15 years later, that training continues to pay off, as Pickoff-White’s California Reporting Project sends out more than 700 public records requests to law enforcement agencies each year. In fact, since its inception in 2018, the project has surpassed 3,500 records requests. Pickoff-White, the project’s director, doesn't plan on slowing down.

“One of the things that draws me to journalism is those known unknowns,” Pickoff-White said. “Like, making visible what is hard to see. Being able to connect the dots. I think systems reporting is one of the things that I love about reporting and records research. It allows you to take people’s lived experiences, back it up with data and say, this is occurring and it is occurring more than once, and to give people some context on why it might be occurring as well.”

Systems reporting "allows you to take people’s lived experiences, back it up with data and say, this is occurring and it is occurring more than once, and to give people some context."

The California Reporting Project was born after the state’s Right to Know Act was enacted in 2018, allowing the public to request police reports and reports related to law enforcement’s use of violence and other kinds of misconduct. Hosted by UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program, the project is a collaborative database with records shared from reporters at 40 news organizations across the state.

“One of the real successes of this project is we’ve already published more than 100 stories out of these records,” Pickoff-White said. “Ever since we started sending requests on January 1, 2019, people have had access to these records and have been able to report out of them. And that’s really important to me, because these are public records.”

With newsrooms increasingly cash-strapped, the cost and time it takes to make and appeal public records requests can be prohibitive. The reporting project’s database collects records obtained from records requests. It also monitors pending requests. That way, reporters can avoid duplicating efforts and instead rely on materials other requesters obtain to use for their own coverage.

“It’s really time-consuming and hard and can cost a lot to make a record request,” Pickoff-White said. “I really encourage other reporters to come together to collaborate on this, because together, we’re stronger. If you could find a way to work with people to invest in the time up front pays dividends in the end.”

With the Trump administration throwing its abductees in shady jails and prisons from Louisiana to El Salvador, it’s essential that incarcerated journalists and whistleblowers are able to expose the conditions they’re dealing with. That is unless you trust Donald Trump’s cronies to admit to abuses.

But incarcerated journalists nationwide face relentless retaliation for speaking truth to power, and they’re systemically obstructed from seeking recourse from the courts.

After I reported on Texas prison officials’ inadequate response to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was charged in bogus disciplinary cases, repeatedly transferred to different prison facilities, tossed into solitary confinement, assaulted with chemical agents, and held in a cell for weeks without basic necessities, like soap, toothpaste, deodorant, a mattress, and writing supplies.

When all my administrative complaints failed to stop the infringement upon my constitutional rights by rogue prison officials, I turned to my only other option — the federal courts.

Being a layman of the law, I failed to realize that my decision to file a civil rights lawsuit against prison officials came with insurmountable judicial hurdles and dire consequences. It was an awkward and untimely introduction to the Prison Litigation Reform Act.

Signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996, the PLRA placed extreme restrictions on incarcerated individuals’ ability to file, win, or settle civil rights lawsuits. Lawmakers argued that there were too many frivolous lawsuits against the government.

But the law severely obstructed the pathways for all incarcerated individuals to obtain justice and crippled incarcerated journalists’ ability to make human rights violations known to the public.

The Prison Litigation Reform Act severely obstructed the pathways for all incarcerated individuals to obtain justice and crippled incarcerated journalists’ ability to make human rights violations known to the public.

Historically, the federal courts were a major source of oversight for prisons and jails. In my home state of Texas, civil rights lawsuits filed by a handful of prisoners led to the class action litigation, Ruiz v. Estelle, that completely transformed the deplorable conditions inside Texas prisons and restored incarcerated constitutional rights.

Judge William Wayne Justice presided over one of the longest periods of federal judicial oversight of a prison in U.S. history, issuing a consent decree that spanned over three decades.

The Ruiz litigation, despite being credited as one of the glaring examples of judicial checks on violations of constitutional rights, would not have stood a chance today.

The PLRA imposes strict challenges on incarcerated litigants that are oftentimes impossible to meet. These limits force the court to dismiss the vast majority of legitimate complaints from incarcerated individuals over the smallest technical issues.

For incarcerated journalists, the unavailability of recourse when they’re retaliated against — as they so often are — exponentially increases the “chilling effect” of potential retaliation. The message is, if you criticize us in your writing, we can do whatever we want to punish you and, with the PLRA, there won’t be anything you can do about it.

Struggling with the ‘exhaustion doctrine’

The exhaustion doctrine mandates that all incarcerated individuals first present each of their grievances to prison administrators through the internal grievance system before suing. If they don’t, the courts are required to dismiss the lawsuit immediately.

This rule fails to consider how prison internal grievance systems are littered with indirect and direct obstructions. Accessing the approved grievance form, meeting deadlines, understanding the grievance process’s convoluted rules, and getting the grievance to the proper prison official are easier said than done.

For example, after I was transferred to three different prisons in five days and tossed into a solitary confinement cell without any personal property, I was a drowning man without a life preserver.

First, I knew none of the staff or incarcerated individuals to enlist them to provide me with an approved grievance form and a pen so I could fill it out.

Secondly, if I was successful in obtaining the form and a pen, the grievance rules only permit me to raise "one issue" per grievance, and one grievance per week, so I have to make the unfair decision of which constitution violations to seek redress for and which ones to overlook. If I cite two violations in one grievance I violate restrictions placed by the PLRA. Texas prison grievance rules allow only 15 days to file grievances about any violation.

Finally, after overcoming those hurdles, I would have to rely on the same guards who were responsible for the violations to process my grievance form, since I was locked in solitary confinement, prohibiting my access to the grievance staff or the designated filing box. There is no system set up to confirm if a grievance has been processed or not. The smallest misstep in this process renders your lawsuit moot by PLRA.

Insurmountable obstacles for legal layman

While I was a staff reporter at the prison newspaper, I was instructed to write all my articles on an eighth grade level. That was the level at which prison officials felt that an average incarcerated individual reads. I have a degree from the University of Houston-Clear Lake, and yet when I made the decision to file my civil rights complaints I could barely make sense of all the rules and statutory language of the courts.

Prison law libraries are stocked with complex and outdated legal books. Simplified DIY books are not available. There is no road map for where to begin. The PLRA requires that specific procedures are followed, which include very tight deadlines. Not understanding and following all of these procedures will result in the dismissal of an incarcerated individual’s lawsuit.

Very few incarcerated individuals, including educated journalists like myself, have the legal aptitude to navigate the complexities of the PLRA.

Very few incarcerated individuals, including educated journalists like myself, have the legal aptitude to navigate the complexities of the Prison Litigation Reform Act.

My lawsuit listed multiple prison officials from four different facilities as defendants. As a result of rules implemented following the passage of PLRA, the federal judge broke my lawsuit up into four separate proceedings and reassigned each of them to four different federal courts.

This process — the opposite of the Ruiz case, where multiple claims were joined together in a class action — completely overwhelmed my already disadvantaged ability to meet all the rigorous rules of the courts.

Despite all of the documented evidence of prison officials violating my constitutional rights by denying me freedom of speech and due process, discriminating against me, and subjecting me to cruel and unusual punishment, my lawsuit was dismissed over a procedural error before the merits were ever considered.

Disincentivizing lawyers from taking cases

Finally, because of restrictions imposed by the PLRA, attorneys are discouraged from taking cases on behalf of incarcerated individuals.

For example, the PLRA dramatically restricts financial compensation incarcerated individuals can be awarded for injuries resulting from constitutional violations, and the legislation places a cap on attorney’s fees incarcerated plaintiffs can recover at 150% of any financial damages awarded.

As the Prison Policy Initiative has explained, that cap is highly restrictive because damages awarded to incarcerated people, in the rare event that their cases get that far, are usually nominal at best.

That results in a mere 7.6% of incarcerated litigants being represented by attorneys in civil rights lawsuits as of 2020, compared to 89.8% of nonincarcerated litigants.

PLRA should be repealed

The PLRA has served no real societal interest since its passage. It has done nothing but stop incarcerated individuals from advocating for their inalienable human rights.

The outrageous abuses inside America’s prisons that have been exposed in recent years should motivate lawmakers to provide incarcerated people with more, not less, access to the legal system. Maybe some incarcerated people file frivolous lawsuits, but so do people on the outside — it’s not a reason to deprive everyone else of legal recourse.

The PLRA’s unreasonable restrictions have bound the hands of federal judges to consider legitimate complaints from incarcerated individuals, hold rogue prison officials accountable, enforce court orders, and compel policy change.

Simultaneously, it unleashed prison officials’ ability to violate incarcerated individuals’ basic constitutional freedoms — including the rights of incarcerated journalists.

It has also restricted the basic function of journalists outside prison, and the taxpayers who read the news, to monitor how public funds are spent.

Outside journalists’ access to incarcerated sources and prison records is severely limited. Trials and court files are among the few places they can find the truth about what goes on on the inside. But when cases are dismissed on technicalities before a judge or jury considers the merits, journalists can’t discern which allegations are true.

Repealing the PLRA is a step toward justice for all. Incarcerated journalists are routinely targeted and subjected to all types of cruelty. Like journalists on the outside who run into oppressive government officials, we depend on recourse from the federal courts to serve as our last line of defense, as our news reporting often does for the incarcerated population and the American public.