Four journalists in Russia were sentenced on Tuesday to spend five years and six months in a penal colony. The crime is their association with the late Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny. More specifically, they were convicted of having worked with a banned organization founded by Navalny, which is considered by the Russian government to be an extremist group. The nature of their extremism is their work to expose corruption in Russia. Navalny of course died in prison at the age of 47 on February 16, 2024.
While it hardly warrants specific notice that Vladimir Putin has yet again imprisoned political enemies, it is notable that President Trump, one of Putin’s greatest cheerleaders, has waged an ongoing battle through the courts against media outlets he deems unsympathetic to his agenda. Unfortunately, it is no longer an outrageous question to ask how long it might take him to follow Putin’s lead and graduate from civil suits against media companies to criminal charges against individual journalists.
A president who is comfortable calling the media “the enemy of the American people” is surely not incapable of taking that next step.
In March at a speech at the Department of Justice Trump said “I believe that CNN and MS-DNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat [sic] party and in my opinion, they’re really corrupt and they’re illegal, what do they do is illegal.” Though we are frequently told to take Trump seriously but not literally, is that position still wise? And if it is not, are journalists who work for organizations Trump describes as corrupt and engaged in illegal activity really safe?
Trump went on to say:
“And it has to stop, it has to be illegal, it’s influencing judges and it’s really changing law, and it just cannot be legal. I don’t believe it’s legal, and they do it in total coordination with each other.
For a long time there have been instances of journalist jailed for activities related to news gathering or potential crimes committed while gathering news. There have been charges related to refusing to comply with legal orders like subpoenas to disclose sources. It is not difficult to imagine some sort of pretense for criminal charges when the reality is that it will be free speech that is on trial. With the Justice Department and the FBI controlled by individuals who are more than willing to do Trump’s bidding, unpleasant things could begin to happen, things that are not consistent with the operation of a free press in America.
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