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Program guarantees 100 new houses in Pittston City

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Their view: The risk confronting NFL owners and players alike

<p>As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump vowed to change the libel laws to make it easier to win big lawsuits against news organizations. It never happened.</p><p>After the election, he pressured the FBI director to consider sending reporters to jail for publishing classified information. That was another non-starter.</p><p>And just last week, he suggested that a TV network have its broadcast license revoked because he objected to a news report. That isn&#8217;t even possible under FCC rules, which licenses individual stations, not networks.</p><p>Trump keeps ranting about the dishonest news media. And reporters and editors keep doing their jobs, undaunted.</p><p>So there&#8217;s no problem and First Amendment champions should just calm down, right?</p><p>Stop overreacting to Trump&#8217;s tweet-threats, counseled Jack Shafer of Politico last week, suggesting that, while not ignoring them, &#8220;we discount their value in the political marketplace down to the junk level.&#8221;</p><p>As many have noted, Trump is actually more accessible than his predecessor - often answering reporters&#8217; questions in informal settings, calling them on the phone and giving plenty of interviews (though mostly to his friends at Fox News).</p><p>What&#8217;s more, his Twitter feed means that we have a real-time understanding of the president&#8217;s thinking, such as it is. (Peter Baker of the New York Times, speaking last week at George Washington University, termed this &#8220;the most transparent presidency we have had in our lifetime,&#8221; and added, half-joking, that Trump&#8217;s tweets are &#8220;like the Nixon tapes, if they were played every night on the CBS News.&#8221;)</p><p>Still, it would be a mistake to see Trump&#8217;s anti-media threats as harmless. They&#8217;re anything but.</p><p>Consider a Turkish court&#8217;s conviction last week of Wall Street Journal reporter Ayla Albayrak. It sentenced her to more than two years in prison, determining that she had engaged in terrorist propaganda by writing a news story. &#8220;This was an unfounded criminal charge and wildly inappropriate conviction that wrongly singled out a balanced Wall Street Journal report,&#8221; chargedJournal Editor in Chief Gerard Baker. The article&#8217;s purpose was &#8220;to provide objective and independent reporting on events in Turkey, and it succeeded.&#8221;</p><p>The State Department issued a strong rebuke to Turkey: Freedom of expression, including for speech and the media, strengthens democracy and needs to be protected, it said.</p><p>Notably, it said, that includes &#8220;even speech which some find controversial or uncomfortable.&#8221;</p><p>Meanwhile, the executive-branch boss was lashing out at American news organizations for reporting that he found uncomfortable - or, as he prefers to put it, &#8220;fake.&#8221;</p><p>&#8220;It is frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write. And people should look into it,&#8221; Trump stormed. Brandishing a copy of the U.S. Constitution, Jake Tapper of CNN retorted that he&#8217;d done the investigation and found the answers. (The president later backed off a bit, saying he didn&#8217;t really want to limit the media; he just wants journalists to be what he considers honest.)</p><p>Trump&#8217;s constant press attacks carry a worldwide price - they hurt America&#8217;s ability to stand for democratic freedoms around the world.</p><p>&#8220;When the president consistently speaks that way, there&#8217;s a loss of U.S. influence and credibility on matters of press freedom,&#8221; Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, told me.</p><p>As Simon sees it, the American government needs to be able to exert influence - and maintain the moral high ground - in all kinds of case involving the news media.</p><p>American officials lean on a strong democratic reputation when they raise concerns about the treatment of the U.S. media around the globe, he said, &#8220;whether it&#8217;s the Chinese government&#8217;s withholding visas, or the Turkish authorities expelling Wall Street Journal reporter Dion Nissenbaum last December, or the ban on CNN en Espanol imposed in Venezuela.&#8221;</p><p>Turkey, nominally a democracy, has a disturbing record of human rights offenses - including throwing many journalists in jail. But Trump keeps lavishing praise on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, calling him a great friend and (as with Vladimir Putin) awarding high marks for strong leadership. (Behind the scenes, Turkey and the U.S. have been in a bitter disagreement about the arrest of an employee of the American consulate in Istanbul.)</p><p>It may be tempting to shrug off Trump&#8217;s threats as nothing but venting - or to see them as a big slab of red meat to feed his base.</p><p>And it may also be tempting to say his fighting words don&#8217;t matter much because the worst threats haven&#8217;t come to fruition.</p><p>But even if Trump can&#8217;t really get a network&#8217;s broadcast license revoked or libel laws changed, he can still can - and does - undermine American values, both here and abroad, when he attacks the press.</p><p>And no amount of transparency-by-tweet or backslapping access for reporters can make up for that.</p><style>
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<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>Margaret Sullivan</p><p>Guest Columnist</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Margaret Sullivan is The Washington Post&#8217;s media columnist. Previously, she was The New York Times public editor, and the chief editor of The Buffalo News, her hometown paper.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Their view: Trump’s threats against press far from harmless