Gary Pruitt, President and CEO of the Associated Press, is the keynote speaker at the Greater Omaha Chamber’s Annual Meeting this year.
Pruitt says his talk is called “Free Press vs. National Security: The False Choice.”
He says he will explain to the audience what happened last year when the Department of Justice secretly seized the AP’s phone records, what the AP did about it and what the AP’s position is with regard to the government’s action.
"The federal government claims that to ensure security they needed to secretly seize our phone records and we felt that that was a false choice and that they violated our first amendment rights. You don’t have to choose between having a free press and national security, you can have both. And we felt the government overstepped its own rules.”
The Greater Omaha Chamber’s Annual Meeting takes place February 20th at 11:30 a.m. at CenturyLink Center.