Alan Roden: Press freedom risks being edged out as politics heads to the extremes

The dinner in Vietnam between Donald Trump and his one-time adversary was another extraordinary moment in this extraordinary relationship, but what was most telling was who wasn’t there.

Reporters from the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, the Los Angeles Times and Reuters were banned from covering the dinner.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders blocked their entry for what she described as "sensitivities over shouted questions in the previous sprays" – sprays being the US term for when journalists attend meetings between the President and foreign leaders.

What questions had angered the Trump administration so much? Well one was about the congressional testimony of former attorney Michael Cohen, whose explosive claims can be summed up in his description of the President as a racist, a cheat and a conman.

Mr Trump’s fondness for blocking journalistic access is not new, but it was described in no uncertain terms by The Washington Post as "an extraordinary act of retaliation by the US government".

The fact that it happened during a meeting with the leader of a totalitarian state which doesn’t have a free press wasn’t lost on those locked out of the room.

In fact, while in Hanoi, Kim Jong-un even answered a question from a foreign journalist for what was believed to be the first time.

Mr Trump’s actions, more than two years into his presidency, have inevitably lost some of their surprise.

On this side of the Pond, they are greeted with a shake of the head and a sense of relief that – whatever the latest incredible twist in the Brexit saga – at least our journalists are free to expose the chaos and put failing politicians like Chris Grayling on the spot.

Of course, that is to forget that Mr Trump’s actions were once witnessed here in Scotland, long before he seized the White House.

On the day after the independence referendum in 2014, at least three national newspapers were barred from attending a press conference at Bute House with First Minister Alex Salmond, who used the event to announce his resignation.

I was among those prevented from attending, while the Daily Telegraph’s reporter was physically blocked from entering the building by taxpayer-funded civil servants when he tried to cover it anyway.

It was a shameful episode that never attracted the UK-wide attention and condemnation it deserved.

In Christmas of 2014, addressing the media in Bute House, Nicola Sturgeon promised there would be no media bans while she was First Minister. To the best of my knowledge, and to her credit, she has resolutely kept that promise.

If Mr Trump learned from his one-time pal Salmond, perhaps Theresa May picked up a few ideas too.

Last year, The Herald’s sister paper The National reported it was banned from a press briefing with the Prime Minister.

Just as the Scottish Government’s actions were wrong in 2014, so too were the UK Government’s actions wrong on that occasion – and must not happen on her next visit north.

But someone who has perhaps learned most from Salmond is Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

After all, the pair spent many hours together in the same voting lobby in the Commons when Mr Corbyn repeatedly broke the whip and showed disloyalty to his party – something which is a heinous crime for any other MP now that the hard left is in charge.

“As you may have noticed some of the mainstream media are slightly hostile and critical,” Mr Corbyn told cheering supporters last month at a rally in Broxtowe.

The Labour leader railed against Sky News for having the audacity to ask the questions the reporter wanted to ask, rather than the questions Corbyn wanted to answer. That’s not how it works, Jeremy, and it’s not how it should ever work.

As Helen Lewis pointed out in a New Statesman article last week, Mr Corbyn was asked why nine MPs had left his party – "which feels like a reasonable line of questioning in a week where nine MPs had left his party".

Back in 2014, the more extreme wings of the independence movement decided the "mainstream media" was their enemy. Some even convinced themselves that marching on the BBC’s HQ in Glasgow would convince sceptical Scots to vote Yes.

But not even the most hardline pro-independence conspiracy theorists can hold a candle to the "JC4PM" brigade.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever needed a bodyguard at an SNP conference.

Yet that’s what happened at the Labour conference in 2017 when the highly-respected BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg needed security protection for daring to ask questions of the party’s leader.

And a key difference is that while Nicola Sturgeon is surrounded by some of the best and level-headed political strategists in the business, Jeremy Corbyn is surrounded by people who genuinely think online blog The Canary is a reputable news outlet.

We live in a world where those on the extremes of politics are rising to the top. That inevitably brings with it a dangerous belief that the mainstream media is the enemy of the people.

Such disdain for journalism has serious consequences by contributing towards a situation where freedom of the Press is at risk.

Think that can’t happen in the UK?

Take a look at Northern Ireland where journalists have been arrested after obtaining documents which suggest police collusion in the cover-up of six murders.

Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey helped make a documentary called No Stone Unturned, which re-examined the murder of six people in County Down in 1994. Nobody has ever been charged.

Last week, the two men presented themselves to a police station and had their bail extended for a further six months.

The National Union of Journalists has warned of a "blatant attempt to thwart the massive international campaign against the arrest of two journalists whose only crime is their search for truth and justice".

Amnesty International has warned that press freedom is at risk. Right here in the UK.

That should serve as an urgent wake-up call to every politician who wants to muzzle a journalist for asking difficult questions.