The administration’s aggressive prosecutions have created “a de facto Official Secrets Act,” Risen said, and the media has been “too timid” in responding.
New York Times reporter James Risen, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, claims the Obama administration is “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.”
Risen won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and 2006 for his reporting on national security and terrorism. He has clashed with the Obama administration over his refusal to reveal a confidential source in a matter that reached the Supreme Court in January.
Speaking last week at a New York conference called Sources and Secrets, Risen voiced his concern about the Obama administration’s interaction with journalists, according to a report from Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon:
New York Times reporter James Risen, who is fighting an order that he testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer accused of leaking information to him, opened the conference earlier by saying the Obama administration is “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.” The administration wants to “narrow the field of national security reporting,” Risen said, to “create a path for accepted reporting.” Anyone journalist who exceeds those parameters, Risen said, “will be punished.”
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