Amid intensifying assaults on the press, is it time for a ‘NATO for news’?
To protect the free press in America, we need to agree that "an attack on one is an attack on all."
On Aug. 11, 2023, police in Marion, Kan. — population 2,000 — raided the offices of the local newspaper, the Marion County Record, as well as the family home of its publisher, Eric Meyer.
The Record’s reporters had been looking into allegations of misconduct on the part of the police chief who led the raid. Meyer’s 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer, was present while the chief’s officers rifled through the home. She died the following day.
This story may sound familiar. It made national news, thanks to coverage by NPR, local and network television news, and the New York Times. The Biden administration weighed in forcefully with a statement by press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre from the podium of the White House press briefing room.
Meyer said what heartened him about this otherwise devastating assault was the “patriotic response” of fellow members of the news media. “An attack on one,” he said at a recent conference hosted by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism and the Aspen Institute, “is an attack on all.”
Defending the rights of an independent free press — the only profession enshrined in the U.S. Constitution — is indeed an act of patriotism. Our nation could sure use more of that kind of patriotic spirit on Presidents Day of 2025. Not only is our new president intensifying his assaults on the press, the American news media have so far seemed curiously flat-footed and uncoordinated in their response.
Consider the ferocity of attacks in just the past few weeks.
President Donald Trump has taken aim at CBS News in a case accusing the network of manipulative editing of a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris, almost certainly within the network’s First Amendment rights. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is investigating diversity, equity, and inclusion policies at Comcast, and sponsorship sales practices that help to support both NPR and PBS.
Last week, the Associated Press, winner of 59 Pulitzer Prizes and among our nation’s most respected nonpartisan news organizations, was banned from the press pool covering some White House events because it continues to refer to the Gulf of Mexico rather than the “Gulf of America,” as President Trump has decreed.
President Trump has been a critic and manipulator of the news media for virtually his entire public and private career, so we should not be surprised by these latest assaults.
What is surprising — and disappointing — is the lack of collective action and response on the part of the press itself.
In the Associated Press case, for example, what would happen if the AP’s erstwhile competitors, including Reuters, CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, refused to attend similar White House events unless and until the AP’s access is restored?
This collective action would leave the White House speaking only to media properties like Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax, favored only by its base. The loss of a larger megaphone would damage the administration’s voice and offend its considerable ego.
The phrase “an attack on one is an attack on all” is drawn from Article 5 of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty that created NATO — another organization under criticism by President Trump. What would such a commitment to collective action, a “NATO for news,” mean in practical terms?
What would happen if news organizations refused to attend White House events until a ban on the Associated Press is lifted?
News organizations have several powerful assets with which to come to one another’s defense.
They can, of course, deploy their reporters and editors to cover attacks on fellow press as they would other abuses of power or criminal acts.
News organizations can also leverage their opinion pages to express the official views of their owners and publishers, independent of their news pages.
They have marketing, advocacy, and legal resources they can and should deploy to aid the cause of a free press broadly, not only the narrower interests of their own news enterprises.
Perhaps most powerfully, they can take the view that an attack on the freedoms and independence of one of us is truly an attack on all.
As fellow Philadelphia newspaper publisher Benjamin Franklin said, “We must hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall hang separately.”
Jim Friedlich is CEO and executive director of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the nonprofit organization that owns The Inquirer. @jimfriedlich