What part of “Congress shall make no law” does House Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings not understand?
The Maryland Democrat, suddenly handed the investigative and subpoena powers of the House, must think there isn’t enough executive branch misconduct to investigate. That would explain why, when finally given the power to hold the Trump administration accountable, he is instead recklessly undermining the First Amendment’s freedom of the press by questioning whether news organizations went and made editorial decisions he doesn’t like.
Yes, it is every bit as dumb as it sounds.
Cummings is now investigating why Fox News did not publish a story in October 2016 about an alleged 2005 affair between then-candidate Donald Trump and porn star Stormy Daniels.
According to former Fox News editor Ken LaCorte, the story, filed by celebrity reporter Diana Falzone, was “half-cooked.” The nine-paragraph piece she filed was based on an item that had appeared online briefly in 2011, before being pulled under legal threat, on a website that publishes reader-contributed rumors. Given that Daniels had publicly denied any affair with Trump at that point, LaCorte decided that the story needed more confirmation than the anonymous second-hand and third-hand sources that Falzone had dug up.
“The story wasn’t close to being publishable,” LaCorte recently wrote for Mediaite, “and my decision to hold it was a no-brainer. I didn’t do it to help Trump and never said nor implied otherwise. It was such an easy call that I never even informed my direct boss or anyone in management about it.”
Cummings now believes he should be using his congressional powers to second-guess a news editor’s judgment. He is summoning journalists to be interviewed by his committee staff. (Perhaps soon he will follow up by proposing a bill requiring more salacious news coverage in general.)
Cummings’ political instincts are probably telling him that going after any part of the Fox News operation is good red meat for the Democratic base. We wish that, instead, his better angels would prevent him from trying to undermine the foundations of press freedom in this country, because that is what he’s doing.
Members of Congress have every right to criticize the media, as do all other citizens. But it is completely out of line for anyone in power to use investigative powers to intimidate and harass news professionals for prudential editorial judgments that they make with the protection of the First Amendment.
Whatever his stated purpose, Cummings has just put all editors on notice: Think twice about what you do the next time you face a judgment call.
All the editors in Washington now understand implicitly that they might have to face a committee the next time they make a decision Cummings doesn’t like. And, of course, other members from both parties are sure to follow his example, so things will only get worse from here.
As LaCorte put it, “If House Oversight can launch an investigation based on the ridiculous notion that publishing, or even more bizarrely not publishing, a story can be construed as an in-kind campaign contribution, then no journalist in America is safe from government intimidation.”
We hear so many complaints about Trump’s unkind words for the media, as if it were unconstitutional to hurt journalists’ feelings. But Cummings’ attempt to impose government oversight on newsroom decisions represents actual harm to journalism. It is far worse than anything Trump has done and at least as bad as anything he has ever proposed.
It is designed to have a chilling effect, and it may be working already.
In 2014, every single Senate Democrat voted for a constitutional amendment to repeal the First Amendment, a measure that would have granted Congress and state governments plenary authority to regulate political speech. Yet even then, Democrats still didn’t dare go after the freedom of the press.
It was only in May 2016 that a group of unelected Democratic officials dared cross that Rubicon. In a secret vote that was not publicly released for months, all three Democratic appointees on the Federal Election Commission voted to punish Fox News for its choices of candidates for the so-called undercard debates. The exclusion of some minor, no-hope candidates, the commissioners reasoned, could be considered an illegal, unreported corporate campaign expenditure. This is the same reasoning Cummings is now using.
At the time, we savaged their flimsy logic for what it was: an attempt by these bureaucrats to subvert all journalists’ First Amendment protections. We even added this reference to candidate Trump:
It turns out, however, that our fears were misplaced. It is not Trump, but the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight Committee who now has placed the freedom of the press in his crosshairs.
With his appointment as chairman, Cummings has been given great power and great responsibility. We hope that he regains his senses and goes back to using his position to investigate government misconduct, not to undermine America’s constitutionally guaranteed press freedom.
