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
Sitting president threatens FCC complaint against anchor as columnist demands prosecution of his own paper's source
As it ran on the front
Died this week, quietly, the presumption that reporting a fact is not the same as committing treason. It was old — older than the current masthead of any paper running this obituary, old enough that most people forgot it needed defending because for a long time nobody in a position of consequence bothered to attack it directly.
It is survived by the underlying facts, which remain reportable, and by the reporters who reported them, who remain employed, for now.…
…(cont) It was preceded in death by a shorter-lived cousin, the presumption that a sitting president does not personally threaten a network anchor with a federal license complaint over an interview he disliked. That one went first, this week too, when the President said he would report Kristen Welker to the FCC — 'rebuke or punishment' were the words used — over her conduct on air. A regulatory threat, filed against a journalist, by the person the agency ultimately answers to. That's not a metaphor. That's the org chart.
The main obituary, though, belongs to the columnist, at a paper not this one, who looked at his own newsroom's Iran war reporting, found the anonymous source who made it possible, and called that source a traitor who ought to be prosecuted — in print, under his own name, about a colleague's work. That's a peculiar kind of self-harm for an institution to publish: a writer arguing that the mechanism his own trade depends on, the confidential source, is itself a prosecutable offense. Whippersnappers used to get taught, on day one, that you don't turn the gun around on your own sourcing. This fellow skipped that lesson, or forgot it, or decided it was bunk.
None of this required a new law. No statute changed. What died is smaller and harder to litigate: the working assumption, inside the trade and out of it, that neither the government nor the press itself would treat ordinary reporting as a crime to be punished rather than a story to be checked. That's a quiet death, the kind with no funeral, just a gap where the assumption used to sit, and it is honestly a little shit, and I mean that as flatly as I can.
In lieu of flowers, protect a source, name a threat, and print the next story anyway.
“A president threatens a network anchor with the FCC over an interview, and a columnist calls his own paper's confidential source a traitor who belongs in prison — one week, two separate people deciding journalism is the crime. Watch who's left willing to pick up the phone and talk to a reporter next time.”
“The President raising FCC accountability for a biased interview is a legitimate regulatory question, that's oversight, it's — reporting him to the agency he oversees for asking tough questions isn't oversight, that's just leverage, and I walked into that sentence thinking it was going to come out differently.”
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.