Show caption ‘This is an administration that prosecutes people for leaking information to the press.’ Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock Opinion Obama undermined press freedom. Now he wants a strong media to stop Trump? Sara Morrison The president can’t lecture the press to be more aggressive. He has made an enemy of investigative journalists and whistleblowers

Wed 30 Mar 2016 14.23 BST Share on Facebook

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President Obama had harsh words for the state of journalism and how it has lapsed in its duties to hold public figures – specifically those vying for his current job – accountable. If that’s truly important to him, he can start with his own administration.

Obama spoke Monday night at the Toner Prize ceremony, which honors excellence in political reporting. When he first ran for president in 2008, Obama said, candidates couldn’t just get away with saying whatever they wanted, regardless of truth. The current election cycle, he said, indicates that this is no longer the case.

There’s plenty of evidence of that – and most of it revolves around one candidate in particular. Now that Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican nomination seems all but certain, we’re seeing the “how did we allow Trump to happen?” media self-flagellation in Sunday columns and the “did we allow Trump to happen?” self-questioning in others.



Robin Toner, an investigative journalist who died in 2008 and for whom the Toner prize was named, “demanded that we be accountable to the public for the things that we said and for the promises that we made,” Obama said. “We should be held accountable.”

Allow me to do exactly that. Obama’s own track record shows that if anyone isn’t being held accountable for the promises he’s made, it’s Obama himself – at least when it comes to the deep-diving investigative journalism he professes to want more of.

On his first day on the job, way back in January 2009, Obama issued a memorandum declaring that his administration was “committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government … and establish a system of transparency”. This was one of his campaign promises. Seven years later, the president has fallen well short of this vow, and many journalists see his administration as the least transparent of all.

The Freedom of Information Act (Foia), signed into law in 1966, is meant to give citizens access to information about the government agencies their taxes support. Less than two weeks ago, the Associated Press reported that the Obama administration set a new record in the percentage of Foia requests answered with either redacted files or nothing at all: 77%. That’s up 12 points from the first year of Obama’s presidency.

This is an administration that prosecutes people for leaking information to the press that would hold it accountable, and which continually obfuscates journalists’ and citizens’ efforts to extract any information from it at all.

This is an administration that claimed, repeatedly, that emails to and from former deputy assistant secretary of state Philippe Reines did not exist – only to finally reveal that thousands of them did, several years and one lawsuit later.

This is an administration that has used the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers at least seven times. By contrast, before Obama’s presidency, the act, in place since the first world war, was used to prosecute government officials who leaked to the media just three times.

This is an administration that has gone after journalists who report on information obtained from leakers by secretly obtaining months’ worth of phone records. That spent seven years trying to compel the New York Times’ James Risen to reveal his sources. That snooped through Fox News’ James Rosen’s private emails and accused the reporter of possibly being a “co-conspirator” in order to get a warrant to do so, and to then keep that warrant secret.

This is an administration that has made it exceedingly difficult for journalists to obtain information from even health and science agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Agriculture, denying requests and restricting access that was once granted. That allows the Drug Enforcement Agency to charge $1.4m to search for its records on El Chapo – a sum that must be paid in full before the agency would begin to fill the request.

This is an administration that has been happy to present the press with the story it wants the public to know, but then throws every possible roadblock in front of journalists looking for the story that the public deserves to know.

“It’s the kind of journalism that’s never been more important … A job well done is about more than just handing someone a microphone,” Obama said on Monday night. “It is to probe and to question, and to dig deeper and to demand more.”