Press can be criticized, but the president cannot use the power of the federal government as a threat against a journalist because the coverage is unfavorable.
Page B1From§Eachthe matinee edition — 31 August 2026
A president threatens a reporter with the FCC; a columnist calls his own paper's source a traitor.
As it ran on the front
Born sometime around the founding, when a printer named Franklin decided the crown didn't get a vote on what got printed: the norm that a source who talks to a reporter does not get called a traitor by the reporter's own newsroom, and that a reporter who asks a president a question does not get threatened with a federal license complaint for asking it.
Survived by: every anonymous source now doing arithmetic before a phone call. Survived by: every reporter's editor now doing arithmetic before a byline.…
…(cont) Preceded in death by: the norm that criticism of coverage stays criticism, and doesn't become a formal referral to the agency that licenses the broadcaster. This week, in the space of one news cycle, a sitting president threatened to report a network anchor to the FCC for 'rebuke or punishment,' and a columnist at one of the country's largest papers described his own newspaper's source — the person who talked to his own colleagues, for his own paper's story — as a traitor who ought to be prosecuted. Two different institutions, a government and a newsroom, arrived at the same instinct in the same week: the person who spoke should be made to regret it.
This isn't a First Amendment case. Nobody's been arrested. That's sort of the point of an obituary — you don't wait for the body, you notice when the pulse stops being checked. A source doesn't need a subpoena to go quiet. A network doesn't need its license pulled to get careful. The threat does the work the punishment used to have to do, and it does it for free, which is, frankly, a hell of a return on one phone call and one column.
Whippersnapper reporters used to be told the job was to make the powerful uncomfortable, not the other way around. That's bunk now, apparently, or at least it's negotiable, depending on the week and which building is doing the threatening.
In lieu of flowers, call your source back, tell them you're keeping the notes, and tell your editor you're keeping the byline too.
“One arm punishes the reporter, the other arm eats its own source — different buildings, same week, same lesson: say the true thing about a war and somebody official wants you punished for it. That's not two stories, that's one machine with two hands.”
“The FCC comment was about fairness in coverage, not censorship, and a columnist calling a source a traitor is his own opinion, protected the same as any other — these are unrelated events involving different institutions that happen to both be, on reflection, about punishing people for talking to reporters.”
The receipts
A Washington Post opinion writer called a source for his own paper's newsroom a “traitor,” saying the person “ought to be prosecuted” for leaking confidential US military info to reporters.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.