The Committee to Protect Journalists submitted comments to the US Department of Justice concerning problems presented by labeling media organizations as "foreign agents".
This statement was originally published on cpj.org on 15 February 2022.
By Katherine Jacobsen/CPJ U.S. and Canada Program Coordinator
On February 11, 2022, the Committee to Protect Journalists submitted comments to the United States Department of Justice concerning problems presented by labeling media organizations as “foreign agents” under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The comments were submitted to the Justice Department in response to a public request from the department for feedback on proposed changes to FARA, which has not been amended since 2007.
CPJ highlighted several administrations’ politicized use of FARA, and called on the Biden administration to stop compelling media organizations to register under the law. The comments also noted the harmful international precedent set by the U.S. government’s use of FARA against the press, which serves as a justification for foreign governments to use similar labeling against the media in their countries.
The full comments submitted to the Justice Department can be found here.
Katherine Jacobsen is CPJ’s U.S. and Canada program coordinator. Before joining CPJ as a news editor in 2017, Jacobsen worked for The Associated Press in Moscow and as a freelancer in Ukraine, where her writing appeared in outlets including Businessweek, U.S. News and World Report, Foreign Policy, and Al-Jazeera.
