press supp bak
see 619 txt
main or 2 lost?
new
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/03/trump-government-tracked-targeted-database-american-citizen-journalists-activists-migrant-caravan.html
Days before the Nov. 2018 midterm elections, President Trump cooked up pre-election hysteria over the so-called “caravan” of migrantsa thousand miles away in southern Mexico, who were slowly making their way on foot towards the U.S. border. The president’s anti-immigrant chauvinism couldn’t stop his party from losing the House in a blue wave of Democratic victories, and afterward Trump largely dropped the issue until it became politically useful again months later during the government shutdown. The American government, however, sharpened its focus after the furor died down, according to a chilling report from NBC 7, NBC News’ local affiliate in San Diego. Documents leaked to NBC 7 show that the Trump administration went about gathering names of journalists, activists, and attorneys who had covered or worked with the fleeing migrants, and created a database that included dossiers on 57 people, including 10 journalists.
Those swept up in the government database where then targets for surveillance and harassment with at least 21 individuals subsequently questioned or arrested by Customs and Border Protection. The U.S. government, in some cases, placed alerts on the targeted individuals’ passports who were listed in thedatabase titled: “San Diego Sector Foreign Operations Branch: Migrant Caravan FY-2019, Suspected Organizers, Coordinators, Instigators and Media.” The documents dated Jan. 9, 2019 included files onsome 39 American citizens, including seven who were tracked by the U.S. government. The documents are part of an interagency “SharePoint” application accessible to a myriad of agencies, including agents from Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S.
Border Patrol, Homeland Security Investigations, and the San Diego office of the FBI.
Some of the individuals who were there for the ultimate caravan standoff with border patrol suspected they were being targeted in the aftermath and the leaked documents showed the extent to which they were being singled out, including journalists being harassed at the U.S.-Mexican border, taken into secondary screening on the grounds it was a national security matter, and in one case denied entry to Mexico altogether. Here’s more on what was compiled from NBC 7:
For each person, the documents show their photo, often from their passport but in some cases from their social media accounts, along with their personal information. That information includes the person’s date of birth, their “country of commencement,” and their alleged role tied to the migrant caravan. The information also includes whether officials placed an alert on the person’s passport.
One dossier, shared with NBC 7, was on Nicole Ramos, the Refugee Director and attorney for Al Otro Lado, a law center for migrants and refugees in Tijuana, Mexico. The dossier included personal details on Ramos, including specific details about the car she drives, her mother’s name, and her work and travel history.
Trump’s America.
==
see press suppression (see main)
lost?
2/17 trumplandia
new
https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/white-house-bans-4-journalists-from-trumps-dinner-with-kim-jong-un/
Trump will go down in history as one of the most anti-press presidents in United States history, often speaking of “fake news” and describing the mainstream media as the “enemy of the people.” And on Wednesday, February 27, the White House banned four journalists from covering President Trump’s dinner with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, Vietnam—including reporters who were on assignment from Reuters, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg News.
According to White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the reporters were banned from the event because of “sensitivities over shouted questions in the previous sprays.”
The journalists who were banned included the Los Angeles Times’ Eli Stokols, Reuters’ Jeff Mason, the Associated Press’ Jonathan Lemire and Bloomberg News’ Justin Sink. Journalists who were allowed at the dinner included the Wall Street Journal’s Vivian Salama and some members of the state-operated North Korean media. Salama, however, did not ask any questions.
...
==
Then, around 2:30 p.m., as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell asked for a vote to proceed to a debate on the healthcare bill, 19 activists were arrested in the Senate chamber, as they shouted "Kill the bill! Kill the bill!"
Protesters: "Kill the bill! Don’t kill us! Kill the bill! Don’t kill us! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!"
Reporters say they were ordered by Capitol Police to delete photos and videos of the arrests from their phones. Senate lawmakers will resume debating and voting on the healthcare bill today.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/confusion-over-potential-restrictions-for-reporters-on-capitol-hill/530148/
Bewilderment and alarm rippled across U.S. newsrooms on Tuesday afternoon as reporters tried to figure out what, exactly, the Senate Rules Committee was attempting to prevent them from doing on Capitol Hill.
“Reporters at Capitol have been told they are not allow to film interviews with senators in hallways, contrary to years of precedent,” Kasie Hunt, a Capitol Hill correspondent for NBC News tweeted. “Conditions for any interview: Previously granted permission from senator and Rules Committee of Senate.”
A staffer with the Senate Radio and Television Correspondents Gallery, who told me repeatedly he couldn’t comment on the matter, confirmed that the gallery director was “roaming the halls” telling reporters about the new rules. (What those rules were, exactly, he wouldn’t say.) Staffers in the Senate Periodical Press Gallery told me that their colleagues were in a meeting trying to figure out the origin and extent of the new rules.
My repeated calls and emails to the Senate Rules Committee, where the rule apparently originated, yielded little additional information. A call to Senator Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican and the chair of the committee, went directly to voicemail. But in a statement, Shelby later insisted that “the Rules Committee has made no changes to the existing rules,” but had been “working with the various galleries to ensure compliance with existing rules.” Those existing rules had, in practice, not always been enforced.
“As ranking member of the Senate Rules Committee I call on the majority to allow reporting in the Capitol to proceed as usual,” tweeted Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat. She later told reporters that “this was just some arbitrary enforcement of a rule that was against common practice on the very day that Attorney General Jeff Sessions was set to testify.” Klobuchar promised to work with other senators to make things “work more smoothly.”
With the news business as competitive as the political environment is chaotic these days, a pack of reporters scrambling for a post-hearing comment can be an overwhelming presence. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the rules were a targeted effort to keep hallways clear of bulky camera crews—which could create traffic jams outside of already-packed high-profile hearings that seem to happen on a weekly basis these days—or part of a broader crackdown. But to journalists, the distinction didn’t much matter. The notion that a reporter would need to seek approval for an interview from a reluctant lawmaker—essentially giving that elected official a clear path to evade questions—is absurd. As National Journal’s Ben Geman wrote in 2015, “impromptu one-on-one interviews, quick exchanges by the elevator, and longer pop-up press conferences happen constantly—and they're extremely valuable, not just to individual reporters but also to the wider cause of good journalism.”
And at a time when the president of the United States is hostile to the press—he’s called American citizens who work as reporters “the enemy of the people,” among other insults—even the possibility of heightened restrictions against reporters provoked alarm. Antagonism toward the press is common among Trump’s supporters, too. Forty-two percent of Trump voters said it was “appropriate for Republican politicians to body-slam members of the media,” according to a Public Policy Polling survey released on Monday; 45 percent said that was inappropriate.
As Senate officials scrambled to figure out what was happening on Tuesday, reporters were already encountering the new restrictions. “I was just told I cannot stand outside of the Budget Committee hearing room to interview lawmakers,” Kevin Cirilli?, Bloomberg TV’s chief Washington correspondent wrote.
Some lawmakers chimed in with support for reporters.
“Maybe not the right moment to lower the secrecy veil on Congress,” wrote Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat. “To whoever is trying to protect Senators - we can fend for ourselves.” And Nebraska Republican Senator Ben Sasse tweeted, “This is a bad idea.”
“Just keep doing what you’re doing,” one Senate staffer told me. “Ask for forgiveness, not permission.”
==
Reporters protest new restrictions on TV interviews in Capitol - Politico
www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/.../capitol-reporters-new-rules-cameras-239495
1.
Television reporters told to stop filming in Senate hallways, prompting ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/...reporters...hallways.../a9861d4e-5053-11e7-91eb-96...
2 hours ago - Television reporters told to stop filming in Senate hallways, prompting ... the ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee, told reporters the policy ...
in arresting a West Virginia journalist - Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../west-virginia-journalist-arrested-after-asking-hhs-se...
May 10, 2017 - West Virginia reporter arrested after trying to ask Tom Price a question ... had been walking through a hallway in the West Virginia state capitol when veteran reporter Heyman began following ... “But the rule of law will prevail.
A Fight Over Reporters' Access on Capitol Hill - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/...over...reporters.../530148/
1.
Reporters in Senate are told they can't record interviews in hallways ...
www.businessinsider.com/senate-reporters-film-interviews-in-hallways-2017-6
1.
Senate Republicans are cracking down on TV interviews in ... - Vox
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/13/.../senate-republicans-resist-press
1.
Trump had a news conference with the Colombian president Thursday in whichhe said, among other things, “There is no collusion between certainly myself and my campaign, but I can always speak for myself — and the Russians, zero.”
No, those are not remarks translated into Spanish by Colombian reporters and then back again. He actually said that.
To be fair, what Trump seems to have meant was that he and his campaign had not colluded with the Russians. And for the first time he appears to have made a disclaimer that he is only speaking for himself. Still, it’s so garbled that he could have meant almost anything, including that he literally always speaks for himself and the Russians.
In the past few days, Trump’s persecution complex has reached new heights. At the commencement address to the Coast Guard Academy on Wednesday he lamented, “Look at the way I’ve been treated lately, especially by the media. No politician in history — and I say this with great surety — has been treated worse or more unfairly.” He has taken to calling the Russia investigations a “witch hunt,” even going so far as to boast about it on Twitter Thursday morning:
Naturally he thinks he’s got the biggest and greatest witch hunt ever. Apparently, he doesn’t know that there were real witch hunts where people were killed and political witch hunts that destroyed the lives of many innocent people. He is certainly unaware that there were leaders who suffered at the hands of political opponents in ways that Trump in his golden palaces eating his two scoops of ice cream and extra sauce every night can only imagine.
I have never seen a more whiny, petulant 70-year-old in my life. In that one respect Donald Trump may indeed hold the title of “the greatest.”
You will notice that Trump’s main nemesis is still the press, which he has villainized since he began his campaign. One suspects that this started out as shtick, building on the thousands of hours of talk-radio research that his lieutenant at the time, Sam Nunberg, provided to him. Beating up on the press is a staple of right-wing media and it gets a huge response from conservative crowds. But up until he started the campaign Trump had always reveled in media attention and went to great lengths to draw it. In fact, he considered himself a member of the club. But over the course of time the hatred has obviously become very real and very personal. He loathes the press and considers it the source of all of his problems.
Obviously, he isn’t the first president to feel this way. Richard Nixon famously kept an enemies list that included a large number of journalists. But Trump is taking this in a dangerous direction. The New York Times story about James Comey’s memo rightly focused on the fact that the president may have tried to obstruct justice by taking the FBI director aside privately to ask him to let Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, off the hook. But Trump said something else in that meeting which has received less attention:
Alone in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump began the discussion by condemning leaks to the news media, saying that Mr. Comey should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information, according to one of Mr. Comey’s associates.
First of all, the FBI doesn’t put people in prison. Trump seems confused about how the justice system works in general, so he probably didn’t know that. One only hopes that he doesn’t figure it out because when he does he’ll realize that his most loyal collaborator, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is the man to talk to about that. It’s true that Sessions is busy at the moment ramping up the drug war and making life miserable for people of color, but he could probably find time to put a few journalists in jail if it would make the boss happy.
Trump’s warm affinity for strongmen like Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is not a good omen in this regard. Every one of those leaders have jailed journalists and worse for being critical of their leadership. Obviously, the U.S. has not yet gone nearly as far as they have, but there are some alarming examples of press harassment since Trump took office.
Just last week a West Virginia journalist was arrested and jailed after following Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price down a hallway asking him about health care policy. On Thursday, John Donnelly,a reporter for Roll Call, was manhandled and escorted out of the building by security guards for asking questions of the FCC commissioners. (Ironically, Donnelly is chairman of the National Press Club’s Press Freedom Team.)
This is not normal. Neither is it normal for State Department officials to speak to reporters the way communications adviser R.C. Hammond spoke to CNN’s White House correspondent, Michelle Kosinski, who reported this exchange on her Facebook page:
Monday night, as the story of the President giving classified information to the Russians was in full evolution, I get a call from … RC Hammond, the State Department’s communications advisor, who had his facts wrong about what was reported and by whom.
But he kicked off the conversation with a venomously irate “What the hell are you doing??!!” Followed up with full-on DEMANDS — over and over, and over again — to tell him who my sources were. He kept pushing, as if he thought this was ample reason. Then, “Why won’t you tell me who they are?” he bellowed repeatedly, again demanding I at least tell him what jobs they held at State, or in what areas.
I had to explain to him that wasn’t how it worked.
It got worse from there.
Granted, the Trump administration is obviously under tremendous stress. But these three random incidents don’t reflect the administration alone. They also reflect an attitude on the part of law enforcement and security officials toward the media that is becoming increasingly hostile. People in authority are taking their cues from the president and that’s disturbing.
Heather Digby Parton,
==
dn
an award-winning reporter is speaking out after he was attacked and forced to leave the Federal Communications Commission headquarters Thursday—all for trying to ask a question. John Donnelly of CQ Roll Call said he tried to ask FCCCommissioner Michael O’Rielly a question after a press conference had ended. But two FCC security guards reportedly pinned Donnelly against the wall until O’Rielly had passed. Donnelly said O’Rielly witnessed the incident and kept walking. Donnelly is chair of the National Press Club’s Press Freedom Team and president of the Military Reporters & Editors association. He issued a statement after the attack, saying, "I have been working as a reporter in this town for years and dealing with the top leaders in our government every day and in the hustle and bustle of press scrums. I’ve never been in a situation where simply asking a question was treated as a crime."
==
mexico
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/5/18/saying_no_to_silence_hear_murdered
==
https://thinkprogress.org/reporter-arrested-for-asking-tom-price-if-domestic-violence-is-a-pre-existing-condition-under-59ec774321d2
A reporter has been arrested for pressing Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price to say whether or not the Trump health care bill would make it harder for domestic violence survivors to obtain insurance.
West Virginia police arrested Dan Heyman at the state capitol Tuesday as he walked with Price and White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, holding a recorder out and asking Price repeatedly about claims that insurers could refuse to serve survivors of familial abuse. That claim is based on inference from the bill’s provision allowing states to abandon consumer protections from Obamacare with federal permission.
Heyman had sought out Price on his way into the capitol.
“At some point, I think [they] decided I was too persistent in asking this question and trying to do my job, so they arrested me,” Heyman told West Virginia Metro News. Heyman was later charged with “willful disruption of a governmental process,” according to the news service.
A police report justifying the charge said the reporter “was aggressively breaching the Secret Service agents” and “causing a disturbance by yelling questions at Ms. Conway and Secretary Price,” the West Virginia Metro News reported. Heyman was only released after someone from his news agency posted a $5,000 bond. He faces a $100 fine and up to six months in jail under state law. ... The traveling press corps who followed Trump’s campaign were frequently turned into a side show at his rallies, kept inside a tight and prominently placed cordon where Trump himself would typically point them out as enemies to his supporters. He also occasionally remarked that America should “open up our libel laws” to make it easier to sue reporters who enjoy First Amendment protections.
In one high-profile incident, a senior campaign aide grabbed a reporter by the arm hard enough to leave bruises — an incident the campaign denied despite video evidence. Trump’s political persona frequently relies on cherry-picking media reports he likes and deeming all others “fake news.”
But journalists can handle being presented as a political enemy to the public. The use of state power to physically detain them and then pursue criminal penalties against them for doing their jobs is something different.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions wouldn’t rule out the idea of using cops and prosecutors to go after the press back in January. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) asked him to commit to “not put reporters in jail for doing their jobs” during his confirmation hearing, and he responded that “I’m not sure.” Subsequent reports that Sessions is considering criminal charges against Wikileaks revived deep concerns about press freedom under Trump.
Both Sessions’ exchange with Klobuchar and the reports of a potential Wikileaks prosecution primarily relate to issues of leaked information and source protection. Heyman’s detention and misdemeanor charge are obviously a different beast, pertaining to reporters’ physical and verbal conduct around the public officials they cover.
Heyman is not the first journalist to experience such rough handling by the legal system in the newly dawned Trump era. Several journalists were detained and charged with felony rioting at a mass roundup in Washington, D.C., on Inauguration Day. Their charges were eventually dropped.
But Heyman’s case is very different even from that mass-arrest sweep. He was solo, in a public building, repeatedly asking a public official for an answer on a matter of some controversy and great public interest.
Republicans and some reporters have scoffed at the idea that Trumpcare would treat domestic violence and rape as pre-existing conditions because the bill does not explicitly do so. But it is not difficult to infer that by allowing states to seek waivers to dump the most expensive health care patients into high-risk pools rather than requiring insurers to cover them at the same price as everyone else, those who suffer ongoing psychological or physiological effects from trauma could quickly be priced out of insurance coverage.
Price may not want to answer questions like Heyman’s. He may not appreciate being bird-dogged by a reporter rather than addressing the media through the controlled environment of a press conference.
But it’s hard to reconcile Heyman’s status as a member of the constitutionally-protected free press with the West Virginia capitol police’s decision that “yelling questions at” public officials in a hallway constitutes an illegal “willful disruption of governmental processes.”
UPDATE
Price addressed the West Virginia episode the following day in New Hampshire. The secretary “commended police in West Virginia for ‘doing what they thought was appropriate’,” according to health care news site STAT.
Price did not say whether or not he shared the officers’ view of the propriety of Heyman’s arrest. “That’s not my decision to make,” he said.
“That gentleman was not in a press conference,” Price said.
==
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bannon-makes-stunning-threat-media-were-going-make-it-worse-you-every-day
...Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon shockingly admitted Donald Trump’s goal (Bannon’s goal) in appointing new precarious cabinet members to head protective government agencies like the EPA — is to dismantle and “deconstruct” those organizations altogether. You can read that Daily Kos story by Dartagnan here.
On thesameday, during a joint CPAC press conference with Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Bannon threatened the media with a quote that is undeniably one of the most odious and perilous public statements made against the free press by a White House official, on record. Chris Cillizza with The Washington Post cites Bannon.
“It's going to get worse every day for the media,” Bannon said, insisting that the “corporatist” media would continue to see Trump pursue exactly the sort of economic nationalism that journalism allegedly despises. Then he added this call to arms:“If you think they are giving you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken.”
Cillizza says the message from Bannon was unmistakable: The enemy of Donald Trump and his team, is not really the Democratic Party, it’s the media. He adds that presidential administrations and the press have often experienced adversarial positions.
But what Bannon and, by extension, Trump are up to is something very different than simply an adversarial working relationship with the media. Bannon doesn't want to change the media. He wants to totally dismantle the media. He wants to break its back and leave it for dead by the side of the road.
What is somewhat ironic, more than disturbing, and almost comical, is that Bannon is telling reputable reporters, including those at the Washington Post, that the White House plans to destroy them. And rather than stand up to him, reporters rush back to their laptops to write up the story, staying respectfully neutral, while indirectly serving as a right wing echo chamber.
Bannon and Trump are using the press to threaten and berate — the press.When will the press, in unity, tell Bannon and Trump, to respectfully go fuck themselves? It’s obvious Bannon and Trump desperately need the press to survive. The mobster-like headman incessantly use the press every day, and seem to forget that it was the media that held their hands throughout the 2016 campaign and essentially walked them into the Oval Office.
So why do most of the press/media accept the degradation, which has become constant, and why do they keep going back for more? Something has to give, because Trump and his cast of hate-filled, lying fear mongers, should not be allowed to use American media as a beacon for tyranny. What’s that saying Dr. Phil likes to use?
"We teach people how to treat us."
Meanwhile, Steve Bannon, the man who Time Magazine labels the “The Great Manipulator,” is living up to that name as he continues to feed, build, and control conservative extremist news rags like Breitbart. Most everything that goes out to Donald Trump’s base of fanatics is calculated, right-wing, and dangerously anger-provoking insidious information....
==