Criminal Investigation of the Press?

Every day, more and more right-wing figures are jumping on the anti-media bandwagon and calling for criminal investigations of the New York Times for its role in revealing the White House's SWIFT bank data collection program. On Fox News, representative Pete King (R-NY) claimed that the NYT had violated the Espionage Act, and called for the Attorney General to begin criminal investigations targeting media outlets who reveal secret government programs (video here).

What we have here is the confluence of a number of disturbing trends in national politics that threatens to change longstanding relationships between the people, the media, and the authority of government. The same voices who have championed Bush's claim to "plenary" (the term used in a legal briefing by former Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, which literally means limitless) executive powers are now directly attacking the people's ability to reveal and counteract executive overreaching.

Those who invoke the Espionage Act presumably do so knowing the shameful history of the law, which was used during WWI to broadly silence legitimate dissent. In the case of Schenck v. United States, the law was used to convict and jail a man for publishing pamphlets that encouraged draft resistance. It was also used to silence 75 newspapers for criticism of government policies, and the editor of the Milwaukee Leader was sentenced to 20 years in prison not for actually publishing criticisms of the government, but for conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act.

Silencing voices who would oppose the evolution of the presidency into despotism is clearly a necessary complement to the president's assertion of unrivaled power. Even those who oppose the NYT's recent outing of the SWIFT bank data program should realize the dangers inherent in such an overly-powerful executive, and should see that minor setbacks caused by unwise publications do not make necessary the forfeiture of our First Amendment rights to an executive branch of limitless powers.