This is the Tom Hartman program.

Let me just lay this out.

A democracy can't function when the people are not fully informed of what the government's doing.

I mean this is a cornerstone, a key cornerstone idea of democratic governance.

This is intrinsic to every functioning democracy around the world.

It was first embedded as a point of law in our Constitution.

From the beginning of our republic, we have said that the press is functionally the fourth

branch of government because it holds everybody accountable and that's why the

fourth estate the press was listed as essentially the only private

business that's mentioned in the entire Constitution is mentioned in the

First Amendment. The Congress shall make no laws of bridging freedom of the press.

And you know the corollary to that obviously is that the executive branch shall not

carry out any actions that abridged the freedom of the press because Congress hasn't

made any laws that abridged that, at least in theory.

But you can't have a functioning democracy when you can't find out what's going on.

And the Trump administration here in Portland went into federal court to claim that it was just fine if their secret police stormtroopers shot at clearly identified and hit by the way in several occasions clearly

identified in credential reporters who were observing the police

riots here in Portland.

And so far, multiple reporters have been shot

or otherwise injured while simply

trying to report on these police riots

that we're having here.

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