Risen Discusses Press Freedoms in the Face of Jail Time

Jim Risen, a Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter facing possible incarceration for refusing to discuss the identity of a source, spoke to a crowd of about 300 people on the University of California Berkeley campus on Thursday evening about national security and press freedoms under the Obama and Bush administrations.

“Obama has endorsed virtually all of Bush’s national security policies,” said Risen in a rare public appearance. “He has made the global War on Terror bipartisan.”

Though a national security reporter for the New York Times, Risen faces possible jail time for refusing to comply with a subpoena to reveal a source in his 2006 book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.

Risen has been ordered to testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA employee charged with violating the Espionage Act. The government alleges Sterling provided details of a covert operation that Risen included in his book.

Risen is appealing his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. If the court does not take the case, Sterling’s trial will likely move forward and, Risen said, he’ll likely be held in contempt.

“At this point, the status quo for press freedom is so bad I don’t think we can stop fighting,” he told a packed audience full of First Amendment attorneys, reporters and high profile guests, like Daniel Ellsberg, responsible for leaking top-secret documents, now known as the Pentagon Papers, to the press in the early 1970’s.

The event was sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Journalism and the J-School’s Investigative Reporting Program (IRP). The discussion was moderated by J-School Dean Ed Wasserman and facilitated by Lowell Bergman, director of the IRP.

“There is currently a fierce war on the press,” Wasserman said, “an assault being waged in the name of protecting official secrets, on people most of the public consider whistleblowers and about government conduct most people believe the public ought to know about.”

This is the first in a series of events hosted by the J-School marking the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.