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By Jack Shafer

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama has declared war on the press, say writers at Slate, the Daily Beast, Reason, the Washington Post (Jennifer Rubin, Dana Milbank and Leonard Downie Jr.), Commentary, National Journal (Ron Fournier), the New York Times editorial page, CBS News, Fox News (Roger Ailes) and even Techdirt.

Scores of other scribes and commentators have filed similar dispatches about this or that federal prosecution "chilling" the press and pulping the First Amendment.

Downie, who could open an aquatics center with the leaks his reporters collected during his 17 years as executive editor of the Washington Post, calls the "war on leaks the most militant I have seen since the Nixon administration."

The most recent casualties in the alleged press war are Fox News Channel and the Associated Press. The phone records of reporters at these outlets were subpoenaed by federal investigators after the organizations published national security secrets.

Then you have New York Times reporter James Risen. Federal prosecutors have been trying to force Risen onto the stand in the trial of alleged leaker-to-the-media Jeffrey Sterling (CIA) since the latter days of the Bush administration. When media strumming on the free-press topic reaches full volume, reporters and their defenders include the leak prosecutions of Thomas Drake (National Security Agency) and John Kiriakou (CIA), even though no journalist (or journalist record) appears to have suffered a subpoena in these cases. (However, the indictments in both the Drake and Kiriakou cases cite email communications with journalists.)

Championing the besieged press has become so popular that some Republicans have switched sides. Even the commander-in-chief of the alleged war, Barack Obama, has proved himself capable of making sad faces about the "war" on journalism!

In his national security speech Thursday, he said, "I am troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable." Obama went on to promise a review of the Department of Justice guidelines on press subpoenas. These are the guidelines that ordinarily exempt reporters from federal subpoenas and which his Department of Justice ignored in the AP and Rosen investigations.

To make nice with the press, Obama promised to convene a powwow of DoJ bigwigs and media organizations to address the press corps' "concerns." (Word to my press colleagues: Invitations to discuss "concerns" with bureaucrats are usually a prelude to a kiss-off.)

But all this legal battering of the press, while real, hardly rises to the level of war. Take, for example, the language in the affidavit for search warrant for Fox News reporter James Rosen's emails, which refer to a "criminal offense." To journalists' ears, the affidavit sounds like the precursor to an arrest, and has caused many otherwise sober reporters to protest that the Department of Justice was attempting to criminalize their business. But as George Washington University Law School Professor Orin Kerr argues in this precise blog item, the language in the affidavit "is designed to show compliance with the Privacy Protection Act" and is not a prelude to a prosecution.

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Column: What war on the press?