Freedom of the Press?

Recently, Obama and the White House have been in hot water over recent scandals with Benghazi, the IRS, and the Associated Press. The most striking of these scandals, to me, is the Justice Department compromising the United States’ First Amendment right and spying on the Associated Press. The Department of Justice secretly obtained two months worth of telephone records of Associated Press journalists and more than twenty separate phone lines, a shocking amount of surveillance and spying between the interactions of reporters and anonymous sources, some being from the White House. This scandal is a clear violation of the First Amendment, and affects the United States’ public and t he news we receive. The line between free press and national security is very delicate, established on trust and expectations that both sides will behave in a certain way. However, because the government went behind the backs of the Associated Press, the trust between the press and national security will be hard to maintain and rebuild, and the public will therefore suffer.

Whenever the Government violates an Amendment, it should be taken very seriously, but there has not been too much has been done since this scandal has surfaced. So, what should we do as citizens of the United States when the Government violates our Constitutional rights?