Homeland Security’s Journalist Database Quietly Churns As Press Freedom Experts Raise Concerns

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Homeland Security’s Journalist Database Quietly Churns As Press Freedom Experts Raise Concerns

May 31st, 2018

Awake Goy

When a federal job posting surfaced last April from the Department of Homeland Security seeking a contractor to develop what it called “Media Monitoring Services,” just a few headlines were made.

A handful of reporters speculated about what the the “monitoring” could involve, drawing clues from a statement of work attached to the posting, which gave a vague explanation of a database that would compile a list of “media influencers,” a.k.a journalists, including their contact information, social media conversations, articles, the “sentiment” of those articles and where they were published.

Yet there wasn’t a sustained outpouring of media attention, and DHS Press Secretary Tyler Q. Houlton quickly dismissed the worried with a tweet, calling them “tin foil hat wearing, black helicopter conspiracy theorists.”

As the news cycle continued, the small bout of commotion inevitably fizzled out.

In one of his signature tweetstorms in early May, roughly a month after reports of the database broke, President Donald Trump went so far as to float the idea of stripping reporters of press credentials, suggesting that be the penalty for those reporting unflattering stories about him. “91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake),” he wrote, directly linking sentiment to perceived veracity.

According to DHS, story “sentiment” is exactly what its database will track.

A DHS spokesperson told Mediaite in a discussion that awareness of whether a report is positive or negative would help decision makers to monitor how the public feels about certain policies and if needed, clear up misconceptions.