Brian Karem, the White House reporter for a Maryland newspaper and Playboy columnist, responded to President Trump’s rants against journalists by telling how he was jailed for doing his job.
Karem made news on Tuesday for going on a tirade against deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders during a press briefing. On Wednesday, he continued to talk about the White House’s attitude toward journalists and recounted the time he spent behind bars for refusing to give up a source.
“There are people that have died serving this country as members of the press, they have been injured, they have been threatened. I was jailed. There are 12 of us that have gone to jail to support the First Amendment,” Karem told Nicole Wallace on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House.”
Karem was sentenced to six months in prison in 1990 following his refusal to give up the names of three sources that helped him attain an interview with a man suspected of murdering a police officer, The New York Times reported.
Karem, then 29, served just two weeks in prison after all three sources ended up coming forward to reveal their identities, according to the National Press Club.
The jailed reporter received National Press Club’s annual Freedom of the Press award.
“I’m sorry but when you tweet out ‘fake media’ and you condemn all of us, that really is a condemnation of the First Amendment and it undermines our republic,” Karem told Wallace.
