INDIANAPOLIS – Donald Trump's choice of Gov. Mike Pence to be his running mate triggered a flashback for former New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
In October 2005, Miller had just been released after spending three months in jail for refusing to identify a confidential source. She was testifying at a Senate hearing in favor of a bill filed by Pence, then a congressman, to keep other reporters from being locked up in similar cases.
Miller recalled that Pence was behind her, literally, in a front-row seat in the committee room as she testified.
“He was there in body, intellect and spirit, I was very grateful for that,” said Miller, now a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
That Pence, the champion of a federal reporter's shield law, would now partner with Trump, a man who has said he hates reporters, came as a surprise to Miller.
The contrast between the two has been noted by others familiar with Pence’s failed efforts to protect journalists from being forced to reveal confidential sources.
“The man I met and came to know is simply very, very different than the Donald Trump we’ve seen,” Miller said of the Indiana governor.
The Republican presidential candidate, on the other hand, has called reporters “lying, disgusting people." He has blacklisted journalists from campaign events, threatened to throw them in jail, sued a former aide over an alleged media leak, and vowed to toughen libel laws.
Steve Key, executive director of the Hoosier State Press Association, met with Pence in 2004 as he was drafting what would become the Free Flow of Information Act.
“I remember a lot of media were surprised and couldn’t understand how a conservative Republican could be pro-media,” Key said.
According to Pence, the issue wasn’t partisan.
He filed the bill with a Democratic co-sponsor directly in response to the jailing of Miller. She’d refused to cooperate with a prosecutor's investigation into the identification of a Central Intelligence Agency operative.
Republican President George W. Bush vehemently opposed Pence's bill. So did the U.S. Department of Justice. James Comey, now director of the FBI, testified against it, saying it would endanger national security.
For Pence, who has long complained about a liberal media bias, the issue involved what he saw as the need for a watchdog press to keep a powerful federal government in check.
“Our founders did not put the freedom of the press in the First Amendment because they got good press—quite the opposite was true,” he later told the Columbia Journalism Review.
Key said Pence saw the shield law as a “good-government provision” to force more government transparency so citizens could make better decisions.
It would become a signature issue for Pence, a lawyer who rebuilt his political career as a radio and TV talk show host in the early 1990s after badly losing a congressional race. Pence had been pilloried by the press for running a negative campaign.
Pence would spend seven years trying to get the bill passed, re-introducing it as he pulled in co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle.
It passed the House but twice died in the Senate, where it was sponsored by now retired Sen. Richard Lugar.
Pence filed it for the last time in 2011, a few months after entering the governor’s race in Indiana.
The fact that Pence was the primary force for a bill protecting press rights hasn’t emerged as an issue his short stint as a vice-presidential candidate.
That may be partly because Pence has been on the sharp end of criticism from Statehouse reporters, who've complained about his often-scripted answers to questions.
"I cannot emphasize enough how frustrating an experience it has been trying to cover Mike Pence," Brandon Smith, the Statehouse bureau chief for Indiana Public Broadcasting, told Rolling Stone magazine earlier this week.
Yet, even as governor, Pence has kept his eye on press concerns, Key noted.
He stopped a bill that would increase fees that government agencies could charge the public and media for open-record requests.
He also blocked a measure that would have allowed the state universities to limit the press' and public's access to crime reports.
“He may have had some missteps, but he understands what the media’s role is,” Key said.
Observers say the mild-mannered Pence and the bombastic Trump are such a contrast in style, image and policy, that other stark differences have emerged more quickly.
“Even if Trump and Pence disagree on press freedom issues, it’s not a major issue in this campaign,” said Anthony Fargo, a journalism professor and head of Indiana University’s Center for International Media Law and Policy Studies.
Fargo said some of Trump’s threats, especially his vow to open up libel laws to make it easier for politicians like him to sue the press, are little more than what he called “bluster.”
That's in large part because a president doesn’t decide what the libel laws are. Most libel cases are determined at the state level using a 1964 U.S. Supreme Court case as guide.
That case set a high bar for public persons to win a libel suit. They must prove the press published information with actual malice, knowing it to be wholly incorrect.
For Miller, Key and Fargo, it’s the anti-press rhetoric from Trump that may be much more concerning, since they fear it will undermine the notion that a free press is a critical to democracy.
“If you continue to rail on the pillars of what creates a strong democracy, you’re going to erode the belief that democratic institutions work," Key said.