Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

House Investigation of BreakThrough News Is an Attack on All Journalism

Favorable coverage of U.S. adversaries is constitutionally protected speech.

Seth Stern is the director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation.

The House Ways and Means Committee last week carried out an attack on journalism that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. The committee subpoenaed BreakThrough News, a left-wing outlet with deep ties to the Party for Socialism and Liberation that is highly critical of the United States and Israel, along with two other nonprofits with similar ideologies, The People’s Forum and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. 

The subpoena deserves the same scrutiny as those issued to New York Times reporters over their reporting on security issues with President Donald Trump’s Qatari jet, which, after significant pushback in the courts of law and public opinion, the government withdrew Thursday — the same day BreakThrough announced its receipt of the legal orders.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, an attorney for BreakThrough, called the committee “a modern day HUAC,” the McCarthy-era committee on so-called “un-American” activities. Communists aren’t the only ones who should be concerned. As Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, put it: “Attacks on independent, alternative, or radical media have troubling history. It is always the I.F. Stones or the WikiLeaks who are first on the firing line.”

The Ways and Means Committee is claiming its investigation is a tax-related probe into more than $39 million that flowed from Neville Roy Singham, a U.S. citizen and tech financier based in Shanghai, to the groups, which it claims advance Chinese Communist Party-aligned interests. But we’ve seen that playbook before: Around the globe, financial probes have been used as pretexts to stifle journalism and dissent, and there’s every indication that this is the latest example. 

BreakThrough News has been criticized for favorable coverage of China and other U.S. adversaries, which it indeed publishes. But favorable coverage of foreign adversaries — even in the form of propaganda — is protected by the Constitution. And BreakThrough’s leadership held those positions long before they had any alleged connection to Singham.

“ The First Amendment was specifically written to protect journalism that the government does not approve of.”

“ The First Amendment was specifically written to protect journalism that the government does not approve of.”

BreakThrough’s editor-in-chief, Ben Becker, had a common-sense observation: “The First Amendment was specifically written to protect journalism that the government does not approve of. Journalism approved by the government wouldn’t need protection,” he said. “That’s why so many of the country’s decisive free speech cases involved the abolitionist press, the radical labor press and the antiwar press. … But history looks back on these episodes for what they were — shameful violations of free speech — and that’s the same thing that’s happening here.”

Though the committee denies it is engaging in content-based retaliation in its most recent letter, past correspondence does little to refute Becker’s framing, citing no evidence of any kind of financial illegality and instead focusing on BreakThrough News’ critical coverage of ICE and Israel and criticizing its connections to the PSL, a lawfully organized domestic political party, which it says, “orchestrated the anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement riots in Los Angeles resulting in violence and dozens of arrests last June.”

My Freedom of the Press Foundation colleague Adam Rose, who also serves as press rights chair of the Los Angeles Press Club, found that last part........

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