To the Editor:

Western North Carolina’s answer to Jim Acosta — Smoky Mountain News Editor Scott McLeod in his last week’s column — frets that “never has the credibility of those of us who call ourselves journalists been under attack like we are today.”

Boo-fricken-hoo. What does the record actually show?

The Sedition Act of 1798 resulted in the arrest of the editors of the Philadelphia Aurora and the Times Piece. I wonder if they would agree with that statement.

Read Upton Sinclair’s The Brass Check, where he compares the title item — a token bought by the customer in a brothel and then given to the woman of his choice — to media owners who purchase the services of journalists.

Jefferson was instrumental in overturning the Sedition Act, but in his second term he instructed state attorney generals to prosecute newspaper editors for sedition.

Jefferson never held journalistic credibility in high esteem: “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.” “I deplore with you the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them.” “From forty years’ experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice.”

Lincoln was responsible for shutting down more than 300 newspapers during the course of the Civil War. Government officials shut down The Chicago Times for excessively criticizing the Lincoln administration. Editors were arrested, papers closed, and reporters kept away from battlefields. Secretary of War Stanton approved the destruction of the DC newspaper, The Sunday Chronicle. A number of editors were sent to prison at Fort Lafayette.

How’s that for being “under attack?”

Teddy Roosevelt tried to sue newspapers for their criticism of his Panama Canal purchase.

Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1918 prohibiting printing, writing, etc. against the war effort. Under this law, Eugene Debs was prosecuted for a speech and Rose Pastor Stokes for writing to a newspaper.

Prior to WWII, Congress passed the Smith Act, the first peacetime sedition law. FDR bullied the media with threats to revoke broadcast licenses and effectively shut down Yankee Radio for criticizing his policies. The day after Pearl Harbor, FDR gave J Edgar Hoover emergency authority to censor all news and control all communication in and out of the country.

Truman famously wrote: “Presidents and the members of their Cabinets and their staff members have been slandered and misrepresented since George Washington … when the press is friendly to an administration the opposition has been lied about and treated to the excrescence [sic] of paid prostitutes of the mind.” Maybe he had The Brass Check in mind.

JFK’s Assistant Secretary of Commerce, Bill Ruder admitted, “Our massive strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue.” JFK tried to shift some of the blame for the Bay of Pigs fiasco unto the press. He called upon journalists to exercise more self‐restraint and to show support for the president as a moral responsibility in time of crisis. He attempted to pressure the media to voluntarily censor itself. Mark Watson of The Baltimore Sun wrote that Kennedy “has thrown overboard the wartime principles and practices which two world wars have justified.”

John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General, sought injunctions to prevent the Pentagon Papers from being published. Nixon had his enemies list and had them audited. His administration tried to revoke the Washington Post’s television station.

When the Obama administration obtained the records of 20 Associated Press phone lines and reporters’ home and cell phones, the AP called the seizure a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into its news gathering activities, betraying information about its operations “that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

When Obama’s Justice Department went after James Rosen’s records, The New York Times editorial board stated, “The Obama administration has moved beyond protecting government secrets to threatening fundamental freedoms of the press to gather news.”

The Department of Justice published a report in 2013 of their review of their practices and policies regarding issuing subpoenas, search warrants, and court orders to obtain records from journalists. David E. Sanger, chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times responded that the revised guidelines were “just formalizing what was observed in past administrations. The guidelines worked pretty well until the Obama administration came in.”

Do you really expect us to believe that current “attacks” rise to these levels?

I think your op-ed is a thinly veiled attack on Trump and I think you have it backwards. The tone and severity of attacks on the administration from the press are unprecedented in modern times. I restrict it to modern times because I am aware of the treatment of James T. Callender towards Jefferson as one of a multitude of worse assaults upon government officials by the press.

When Clark Holt, ombudsman for The New York Times left that position, he remarked on how poorly the newsroom reacted to his oversight of their work and resisted accountability. They were fine asking invasive questions, but did not like to have the tables turned and be criticized in public.

Perhaps you could consider the 1924 inaugural address of president-elect of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Paul Bellamy: “Blessed be the critics of newspapers.” 

Timothy Van Eck

Whittier