Dear Friend of Press Freedom,
Rümeysa Öztürk has been facing deportation for 268 days for co-writing an op-ed the government didn’t like, and journalist Ya’akub Vijandre remains locked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement over social media posts about issues he reported on.
Join us today and Dec. 21 in New York City for two special screenings of the Oscar-shortlisted film “Cover-Up” by Laura Poitras — an FPF founding board member — and Mark Obenhaus.
Read on for more on what we’re working on this week. We’ll be back in the new year.
Covering protests is a dangerous job for journalists
As of Dec. 15, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has documented 32 detainments or charges against journalists in the U.S. — 28 of those at immigration-related protests — according to a new report released by the Freedom of Press Foundation (FPF) project this week.
The report notes how, unlike most years, the majority of journalists were released without charges or had them soon dropped, with law enforcement instead focusing on deterring news gathering rather than pursuing charges.
Stop the deportation of Heng Guan
Use our action center to tell lawmakers to stop the Trump administration from deporting Heng Guan, who helped journalists expose the horrors of Uyghur prison camps in Xinjiang, China. He’s exactly the kind of person asylum laws are intended to protect.
The next hearing in Guan’s case is Jan. 12. He could be sent to Uganda, placing him at risk of being shipped back to China, where, according to his mother, he’d likely be killed.
The FCC’s declaration of dependence
Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr admitted at a Senate hearing on Wednesday that there had been a political “sea change” and he no longer viewed the FCC as an independent agency.
FPF Director of Advocacy Seth Stern wrote for The Guardian that Carr’s admission proves the danger of letting a self-proclaimed partisan weaponize the FCC’s public interest standard to grant himself amorphous censorship powers. “Carr avoids ever articulating his vision of public-interest news, forcing anyone seeking to avoid his ire to play ‘Whac-A-Mole.’ … The only discernible rule of Carr’s FCC is ’don’t piss off Trump’.”
Trump’s BBC lawsuit is nonsense, like his others
President Donald Trump on Monday followed through on his threats to sue the BBC over its editing of his remarks on Jan. 6, 2021, for a documentary.
“If any ordinary person filed as many frivolous multibillion-dollar lawsuits as Donald Trump, they’d be sanctioned and placed on a restricted filers list,” FPF said in a statement, noting that Trump has demanded a total of $65 billion in damages from media outlets since taking office.
Under First Amendment, Diddy ‘can’t stop, won’t stop’ Netflix documentary
Sean “Diddy” Combs is threatening to sue Netflix for airing a docuseries that is, to say the least, unflattering to him. The disgraced music mogul’s cease-and-desist letter claims the series, “Sean Combs: The Reckoning,” uses “stolen footage.”
Stern wrote for Rolling Stone about why Diddy’s threatened lawsuit would be a non-starter: the right to publish content that sources obtain illegally is well established. But a series of recent cases nonetheless puts that right under unprecedented attack.
Body camera footage is for the public
The town of Hamburg, New York, claims its police body camera footage is copyrighted despite being a public record. It’s telling people who request footage under New York’s Freedom of Information Law that they can’t share the footage with others.
That’s ridiculous, and we wrote a letter to the police chief telling him to stop the nonsense and tell anyone who has received these frivolous warnings that they’re free to share body camera footage as they see fit.
Ask Lauren anything
FPF Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy Lauren Harper joined fellow Freedom of Information Act experts Jason Leopold, Liz Hempowicz, and Kevin Bell to take questions about FOIA and the numerous ways that it’s broken. They teamed up for a Reddit “ask me anything” discussion this week.
Free screening of “Cover-Up”
To our New York audiences and documentary film buffs: FPF is proud to host a special screening tonight of the Oscar-shortlisted film “Cover-Up” by award-winning directors Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, followed by a Q&A moderated by our executive director, Trevor Timm. The film chronicles the career of legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
What we're reading
The Pentagon and the press
It’s shameful the Department of Defense is curtailing press access five decades after the Supreme Court’s Pentagon Papers ruling, Harper told NPR’s “1A.” Harper also joined “1A” to discuss how the Trump administration is enhancing its surveillance capabilities.
The US supreme court’s TikTok ruling is a scandal
That TikTok remains available “makes a mockery” of the government’s earlier national security claims that the platform was “an urgent national security risk – and of the court that deferred to those claims.”
How an AM radio station in California weathered the Trump administration’s assault on media
“‘Chilling effect’ does not begin to describe the neutering of our political coverage,” said one former KCBS journalist about the aftermath of Carr’s threats.
Defend the press: Brendan Carr has gone too far with attacks on media
Read the op-ed we co-wrote with partner organizations demanding the FCC recommit to the First Amendment.
Paramount’s Warner Bros Discovery bid faces conflict of interest concerns
Stern explained, “Throwing out the credibility of CNN and other Warner Bros Discovery holdings might benefit the Ellisons in their efforts to curry favour with Trump, but it’s not going to benefit anyone else, including shareholders.”
