The Free Press

Floor Speech

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Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, first, I want to say how much I appreciate Senator Sasse's words. I hope that other people in his political party will have the courage he has to stand up and speak out on some of these things.

This week, the President of the United States went overseas. Instead of standing up to America's enemies, the President of the United States went out of his way to attack the American free press.

As Senator McCain described today's press conference with Russian President Putin: ``The President made a conscious choice to defend a tyrant against the fair questions of a free press and to grant Putin an uncontested platform to spew propaganda and lies to the world.''

Let me repeat that. Senator McCain--once a Republican nominee for President of the United States and one of the most respected Senators of our lifetimes--said: ``The President made a conscious choice to defend a tyrant against the fair questions of a free press and to grant Putin an uncontested platform to spew propaganda and lies to the world.''

We are talking about a man--President Putin--who presides over a regime in which journalists are killed. According to a 2016 PolitiFact article, Russia ranks 180 out of 199 countries for press freedom, behind, not ahead of, Iraq, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and others. This is according to the international watchdog Freedom House. After all, Putin was a KGB agent.

Yet the President didn't just defend a dictator against the press; he openly attacked the American free press. While heading to meet with the leader of a country that tramples on the rights of journalists, our President, President Trump, said: ``Much of our news media is, indeed, the enemy of the people.'' That is Soviet talk. That is Putin kind of talk. That is KGB talk. That has never been the talk of an American President. ``Much of our news media is, indeed, the enemy of the people.''

Everybody in this body knows a lot of reporters. Nobody in this body believes that the media are enemies of the people. Unfortunately, almost nobody on this side of the aisle will stand up to the President and say: No, Mr. President. No, FOX News. The media are not enemies of the people; they are doing work that is essential to our democracy.

A journalist's entire job is to ask tough questions to challenge powerful interests. In church, we comfort the afflicted. Journalists afflict the comfortable. We know that reporters put their safety and sometimes their lives--we see that--on the line, whether when they are covering floods and hurricanes at home or when they are transversing the globe to bring us war zone stories. We depend on reporters in Ohio and around the world to bring us the stories that have an impact on our day-to-day lives and to tell the stories that might not otherwise be told. Yet, too often today, we see reporters restricted, vilified, and threatened--all for doing their jobs. We can't dismiss these threats as just empty rhetoric.

Think of the anguish and the heartbreak and the terrible sight that happened at the newsroom at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis. We all know too well how dangerous a job it has become to report the news. Just last Thursday, the Herald newspaper--the daily paper south of Columbus in Circleville, OH--received an unmarked letter in the mail. Inside, it threatened physical harm to all of the workers there. Think about that--just for doing their jobs at a local newspaper in covering football games, in covering a business that might have cheated a customer, or in covering a politician who might have cut corners. In serving their community, these workers had their safety threatened.

This is personal to me, and I apologize for making this personal. My wife, Connie Schultz, is a Pulitzer Prize winner from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She writes a weekly column for the Creators Syndicate in 150 newspapers. She is about as far from being an enemy of the people as anyone I know.

She was a working-class kid who grew up in Ashtabula, OH. Her dad carried a union card, which saved her life because she had health care at the Cleveland clinic that other people would have not been able to have benefited from whose dads didn't have insurance. She worked her way through Kent State University, and she became a reporter.

Do you know why she won the Pulitzer Prize? She won the Pulitzer Prize because she has written about servers--servers in restaurants where sometimes management skims their tips. She has written about single parents who struggle every day and oftentimes get little help from anybody. She has written about workers and a system that is so often rigged against them. They work every bit as hard as we all do here, but they get so little for it.

She teaches at Kent State. She teaches millenials. She teaches young men and women who are mostly working-class kids, most of whom will graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, which is something the President of the United States has never faced. They work part time and some of them full time. They struggle to get through their classes. They want to be reporters because they want to go out and comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable because they care about truth and care about honesty. Again, they are as far as can be from being enemies of the people. How shameful it is the President of the United States says that.

The job of the President of the United States and the job of our political leaders is to set an example--to respect our democratic institutions, including the press, and to bring Americans together and not divide us.

Please, Mr. President, won't you do that?

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