Rem Rieder

[Commentary] Donald Trump hardly has a record as a champion of the press. It's somewhat surprising that his choice of running mate, Gov Mike Pence (R-IN), over the years has been a stalwart champion of freedom of the press.

During his years in Congress, Pence was a leader in the persistent, but ultimately unsuccessful, effort to pass a shield law, which in many instances would protect journalists from being forced to identify confidential sources. In an op-ed in The Washington Times in 2008, Pence gave a ringing endorsement to the importance of an aggressive press in a free society, one that would have been right at home in a dispatch from the American Society of News Editors. But Pence stumbled mightily over the government/media relationship early in 2015 when his administration made plans to set up what essentially would have been a government-run news service. According to documents obtained by The Indianapolis Star, the news service was to feature articles by state press secretaries that would be published on a website and made available for use by news outlets around the state. Once the plan leaked, it was instantly derided as a ploy to disseminate government-sanctioned news that would be more at home in a totalitarian state than in a democracy.

You're a conservative, people will tell the Sen Mike Lee (R-UT). How can you be critical of the rampant surveillance by the National Security Agency? But there's no contradiction there in Sen Lee's view.

It's more like a natural outgrowth of his beliefs. "Some of the programs threaten to undermine privacy," Sen Lee says, adding that the federal government is simply too intrusive.

Sen Lee was the kickoff speaker at a panel discussion roughly a year after the first revelations of widespread government snooping in classified documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

While the Snowden disclosures have led triggered public concern about the impact of government surveillance on privacy, totally unapologetic was one of the panelists, Mike Hayden, a former head of the NSA and the CIA. Hayden, who said the panel's title should have included security as well as privacy, asserted several times that there have been no abuses in the collection of telephone records of ordinary American citizens not suspected of terrorism as well as the scooping up of e-mail in another program.

The colloquy, titled Privacy in America: The NSA, the Constitution and the USA Freedom Act, was sponsored by Microsoft, the ACLU and The Washington Times.