[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 119 (Monday, July 16, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Page S4971]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             THE FREE PRESS

  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?
  I yield the floor.

                          ____________________