President Obama’s conciliatory gesture toward the press this week — a review of Justice Department investigations involving journalists — struck some national security reporters as closing the door after the sources have already bolted.
In announcing the review in his speech on Thursday, the president said he was troubled that recent investigations, which involved the extensive tracking of a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, and the seizing of phone records at The Associated Press, “may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable.”
Journalists say that chill has already set in. Jeremy Scahill, who writes about national security for The Nation, said that some sources who used to agree to encrypted chats and off-the-record conversations have recently stopped feeling comfortable with these terms.
“At times it seems that being a Luddite may be the safest way to do serious national security reporting in a climate where there appears to be an intensifying war on serious journalism,” Mr. Scahill wrote in an e-mail.
Noah Shachtman, editor of Wired.com’s Danger Room blog, said that sources had told him to stay away in the recent climate of leak prosecutions.
“There’s one source I have to run into ‘by accident’ at some public function who before I could just contact directly,” Mr. Shachtman said.
James Bamford, author of the 1983 best seller “The Puzzle Palace” about the National Security Agency, said these latest leak cases make it increasingly difficult to establish new source relationships and that affects his reporting over all.
“It’s important to get this information out there that doesn’t come through a press release, through the front door of the White House or the Pentagon,” Mr. Bamford said. “Far more information comes through a side door or a back door.”
Many reporters found themselves spooked by the extent of the government’s investigation of Mr. Rosen, Fox News’s chief Washington correspondent. The affidavit, a request for e-mails from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, provided minute-by-minute details about what time both men came and left the State Department and the length of their phone conversations down to the second and also took the unusual step of labeling the reporter a potential “co-conspirator” in the leak of classified information about North Korea’s nuclear program.
Josh Meyer, director of education and outreach at the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative at Northwestern University and a writer for Quartz, said that in the 30 years he has lived on and off in Washington, he has never found journalists to be so skittish about being under the government’s watchful eye.
“It’s so bad that there’s a gallows humor that has sort of emerged out of this,” Mr. Meyer said. “You see journalists at parties, and you joke about ‘How is the investigation going?’ ”People just assume they’re being investigated, and it’s not a good feeling.”
He said that he was “highly skeptical” of President Obama’s announcement. “One would think he would have done that months or years ago when these investigations were authorized.
In his speech, President Obama said that as part of its review the Justice Department would “convene a group of media organizations to hear their concerns.” Bruce D. Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, called the announcement “a welcome development,” but he remained cautious about what might actually result from these talks.
“We would want to come out of any such dialogue with an acknowledgment from the government that a reporter does not commit a crime when asking for information,” he said. “The second objective would be that the government honor its duties to notify the news media when it seeks journalists’ records. That will give the news media the proper opportunity to challenge those requests in court.”
