FREEDOM AND THE PRESS

...Almost every newspaper continues to publish an editorial page...

...Everyone acknowledges that some secrecy on the part of the government is indispensable to national security...

...The key word here is "independence...

...but a free press has examined and detected its errors, and the people have from time to time reformed them...

...This freedom has alone made our government what it is...

...This article is adapted from his paper, "The Press, as Censor of Government," delivered as the first of the Lucius W. Nieman Chair lectures sponsored by the Marquette University College of Journalism recently...

...No, they need to be reported, all right...

...It remained, however, subject to the formidable restraint of severe punishment for publication of any matter that might be deemed seditious or subversive...

...It deprives the government of the stimulating and therapeutic influence of criticism...

...And althought not everyone who uses it knows precisely what it means, most Americans would fight for it and, perhaps, even die for it...

...The men who established the American Republic were not sentimentalists...

...Some have been conspicuous for gallantry in the face of popular hostility...

...there is nothing to let one know which justices were in the majority, nor what they said in their opinion, nor what views were expressed by the dissenters...

...The area is peculiarly difficult for the public to understand for it involves today technical and scientific matters which are wholly a mystery to most ordinary laymen and also because it is of necessity, at least to some extent, shrouded in secrecy...

...Second, a free press is supposed to speak out in defense of the rights and liberties of the people whenever these are threatened—even in the name of national security—and to give warning of any extension of governmental power beyond the perimeters fixed for it by the Constitution...

...This is the business of the news pages...

...This freedom alone can preserve it...

...There has been some useful exposure and censure of the kind of corruption that takes the form of venality...

...What is to be said, for instance, about the recent discovery—a discovery made not by a newspaper but by Senator John J. Williams of Delaware—that the Federal government bought millions of pounds of feathers during the Korean war to build up a giant stockpile—bought inferior feathers at vastly superior prices and at a time when representatives of most of the companies selling feathers to the United States were on the advisory board on feather purchasing policies...

...It has long been extremely fashionable among American editorial writers to deplore the trend toward centralization of authority in the Federal government...

...it is used to propagate support for official policies and to promote official doctrines...

...They provided for freedom of the press because they knew that the best government is government which is incessantly subjected to critical scrutiny, and because they understood what we tend so largely to forget today, that the eternal vigilance so commonly said to be the price of liberty is vigilance against duly constituted authority...

...In a good many cities, when you pick up the daily paper you get an impression that the entire local populace has been engaged for the preceding twenty-four hours in an orgy of sex, crime, and violence...

...Whatever the justification, I think it fair to say that newspapers and newspapermen are generally less inquisitive, less probing, less insistent upon being told what is going on than they used to be...

...They were, in the true sense of the term, idealists—but idealists of the most practical sort...

...Nothing expresses more clearly the essential difference between a totalitarian society and a free society than the relationship in each of the press to the government...

...government in its own estimation, has been at all times a system of perfection...

...There are some 1,700 dailies in the United States, and no two are exactly alike...

...They are, nevertheless, arguments for less freedom...

...They are a part of the pattern of life about which the community needs to know...

...Certainly the founders of the American Republic desired a relationship between press and government just as they desired a relationship between church and government, different from that existing in the England from which they declared their independence...

...The aspect of the relationship between government and the press which concerns me most of all and seems to me the most significant is the role of the editorial page...

...The most remarkable thing about American editorial comment on the U-2 incident, on the Cuban invasion, on the impasse at Berlin, on Laos and Viet Nam and the Congo is its essential uniformity...

...The decline of the editorial page, so often noted with so much lamentation by so many journalists, can fairly be said to have taken place in direct ratio to a decline in attention to those affairs which lie at the heart of the community which a newspaper is supposed to serve...

...Neither do I intend to suggest that sex, crime, and violence should go unreported...

...It is disconcerting, for example, to read a wire story from Washington telling that the Supreme Court has decided a major case by a five to four decision and then to discover that this is all the story is going to tell about the decision...

...The editorial page, once the heart and soul of the American newspaper, has fallen in many instances into disuse...

...but it is obvious that people who have authorized an agency to act in this way—and in complete secrecy, without any kind of accounting whatever—have relinquished a large measure of control over their own destinies...

...I am aware that it is a staple part of the charge that newspapers are often irresponsible...

...That program was instituted in 1947 as an emergency measure to deal with what was supposed to be a crisis...

...This is the business of the editorial pages...

...No other conclusion can comport with the bracketing of the two in the same unequivocal language of the First Amendment...

...No government ought to be without censors," he wrote in a letter to George Washington in 1792, "and while the press is free, no one will...

...A nation which is determined to remain free is therefore right in demanding the unrestrained exercise of this independence...

...At any rate, they have just as much need to be informed as their big-city fellow citizens...

...Yet it is precisely in regard to local matters that editorial pages are capable of the greatest expertness and the greatest impact on community life...

...The common excuse for failure to do this is a shoddy excuse—the same shoddy excuse that is given by radio and television for pandering to the lowest common denominator of public taste...

...For they desired a press which would operate as a tribune of the people, championing their liberties, and as a censor of the government, challenging its powers...

...It is this department of the newspaper for which the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom has most meaning...

...How can readers form for themselves any intelligent judgment about the decision on the basis of such incomplete and inadequate reporting...

...Freedom of the press is an American shibboleth...

...The excuse is that the public would rather read about local rape, mayhem, and scandal...

...They have let these committees—the House Un-American Activities Committee in particular—thrust their inquisitorial noses into areas of American life traditionally considered immune from governmental control— universities, churches, labor unions, the press itself—without any apparent understanding of how recklessly these committees' were expanding the reach and power of the government...

...Thomas Jefferson spoke of the press explicitly as a censor of the government...

...And now, fifteen years later, it remains in full force, in all its essentials as repugnant as when it began to every American tradition of fairness and respect for individual dignity...

...Everything secret degenerates," Lord Acton once wrote . . . "Nothing is safe that does not show it can bear discussion and publicity...

...And if they want to preserve freedom of the press, they had better foster a public opinion which comprehends and appreciates the blessings of liberty...

...ship of government by the press rather than censorship of the press by the government...

...The probable consequence of concealing them would be panic—or at the very least an encouragement of the conditions which propagate them...

...On the contrary, I mean to raise a rather different question...

...Moreover, this privileged position is no mere legalism or abstraction...

...Senator Williams said, "I was told that it would be a great disservice to national security to tell me how many feathers we have in the stockpile...

...The arguments for more secrecy may be good arguments which, in a world that is menaced by Communist imperialism, we cannot altogether refute...

...Let me turn now to the area in which I think that the press, out of a desire to be responsible, has become too largely a partner and apologist for the government rather than a censor and critic...

...As late as 1823, although he had been mercilessly maligned by the Federalist journals of his day, he was still able to write to a French correspondent, "This formidable censor of the public functionaries, by arraigning them at the tribunal of public opinion, produces reform peaceably, which must otherwise be done by revolution...

...The first Continental Congress referred to liberty of the press as a means "whereby oppressive officers are shamed or intimidated into more honorable or just modes of conducting affairs...

...They are usually content to look above and beyond these to more remote national and international issues, about which their opinions are less likely to evoke resentment among their readers...

...And it is preeminently this department which is supposed to discharge the newspaper's function of censoring the government...

...some have been conspicuous only for their orthodoxy and their docile following of the crowd...

...and the only question in connection with them is a question of emphasis in relation to other kinds of news...

...The ill effects are the same whether the reasons for secrecy are good or bad...

...And he cited the observation made in 1799 by Madison, who drafted the First Amendment, that it embodied "the essential difference between the British Government and the American Constitution...

...That extraordinary analyst of the American psyche, Alex de Tocque-ville, observed that "the more we consider the independence of the press in its principal consequences, the more we are convinced that it is the chief, and so to speak, the constitutive element of freedom in the modern world...

...It is sometimes said that readers get the newspapers they deserve...

...This basic truth has been put better than I know how to put it by my favorite editor...

...It has its most unfortunate effect in a tendency to avoid local controversy out of a fear of alienating or antagonizing anv segment of the community...

...They have done their jobs with varying degrees of skill and courage and conscience under varied circumstances and in accordance with the various views of their editors and publishers...

...and now no one even questions the need for it or the wisdom of it or the basic un-Americanism of its operation...

...This is especially true today, it seems to me, in foreign affairs...

...Indeed, there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that they are opposites...

...It has long been a settled matter in American life that newspapers are entitled to cuss out the government as lustily and as unreasonably as they please...

...It is not true that readers in small cities are less interested than readers in big cities in what is happening in Algeria or in Berlin or in the Congo...

...So there is a closing of the editorial ranks...

...Atrophy of the editorial page, let me add, is most common in the smaller cities where monopoly situations prevail...

...A free press—that is, a press free from governmental regulation or control—serves as a censor of the government in two ways...

...But what everyone tends to forget is that secrecy, no matter how necessary it may be, is inevitably at odds with freedom...

...Perhaps it would...

...It deprives the people of that censorship of official action for which the press was made independent of the government...

...No more than a few newspapers have cried out against the often arrogant and arbitrary and cruel behavior of certain Congressional investigating committees...

...If newspapers are to fulfill their function of enabling and equipping a people to be self-governing, they must tell the people about what is going on in the world in a way that will make the world's developments understandable and real...

...Many a time, in traveling around the country, I have picked up a strange newspaper in a strange city—and found myself almost completely cut off from news I wanted and needed to know of the larger world...

...I suppose they think Nikita S. Khrushchev could win the cold war if he found out how many feathers we had in the stockpile . . . Are they expecting us to engage in a pillow fight over Berlin...

...I do not propose to add to that indictment...

...There is no real debate on the matters that mean life or death to the nation...

...The men who established the American Republic sought censorALAN BARTH, an editorial writer for the Washington Post, is the author of "The Price of Liberty" and "The Loyalty of Free Men...

...A press which enjoys such independence of the government is, almost by definition, in some degree irresponsible...

...It may be contended, in other words, that it is desirable, or even necessary, to have a Central Intelligence Agency which takes it upon itself to launch a little invasion here, engineer a putsch there, or install a puppet dictator in some other part of the solar system...

...Perhaps, indeed, it will afford to the free world precisely that margin of superiority requisite to its survival in the long struggle it faces against totalitarianism...

...Too often the editorial page is a newspaper's least-read feature—perhaps because too often it has ceased to be censor and has instead become a part of the official establishment...

...Again, let me acknowledge that there are persuasive arguments to support journalistic cooperation with the government for the sake of national security...

...But many of them are in serious danger, I think, of losing their freedom through disuse, through atrophy...

...When secrecy is tolerated at all, it may well be used to mask selfish as well as patriotic purposes...

...This amounted to an extremely effective form of censorship...

...There are, to be sure, a few discordant, strident voices;-every profession has its reprobates, of course...

...And if they are less interested, is this not almost inescapably the fault of the newspapers serving them...

...I am not presenting this as an illustration of excessive responsibility on the part of the press...

...And they are much more "responsible" than they used to be—in the days when competition spurred a large degree of irresponsibility—about telling all they know...

...The record of the press is not so praiseworthy of late, however, in regard to a kind of corruption deeper and more dangerous than venality— a corruption of basic American values and an encroachment of governmental power upon tradf* tional civil liberties of a sort that the authors of the Bill of Rights would have considered intolerable and which they relied on a free press to prevent...

...but few officials of the government have the hardihood to cuss out the newspapers, and none of them dares to suggest that newspapers be called to account in any way for their supposed misconduct...

...A press which serves faithfully and fearlessly as a censor of the government is a source of great national strength...

...But if the public taste is so debased, the newspapers can scarcely escape a measure of blame for the debasement...

...Among the totali-tarians, the press, like every other institution, is an instrumentality of the state...

...It has simply, out of a sense of patriotism, of "responsbili-ty", silenced itself and supported the powers that be...

...There is no doubt that the motivation behind this self-restraint —this "responsibility"— is patriotic...

...I want to ask—and not altogether rhetorically by any means—whether the press in the United States today has not become excessively responsible, whether it has not, in fact, to an alarming degree, become a mouthpiece and partner of the government, rather than a censor...

...A measure of irresponsibility was the price which had to be paid—and which the Founders were quite prepared to pay—for the independence without which the press could not discharge its vital function...

...I am trying simply to suggest that a press which allows it to go on without exposing it is a press which has become much more an accomplice or partner of the government than a censor...

...Too often, however, it has become a mere vestigial appendage—an adornment perpetuated long after its purpose has been forgotten, as men continue to wear on the sleeves of their jackets buttons which have become altogether devoid of utility...

...This "responsibility" is commendable, in a way...

...In England, by the time of the American Revolution, the press was already free from prior restraint in the form of licensing, or direct censorship...

...As the late Professor Zachariah Chafee put it drily, "A death penalty for writing about socialism would be as effective suppression as a censorship...

...The consequences of secrecy are not less because the reasons for secrecy are more...

...In a free society, however, the function of the press is, rather, to oppose the government, to scrutinize its activities and to keep its authority within appropriate bounds...

...I am not trying to attack or to defend this kind of secret activity by government...

...I think the failure can be discerned, to begin with, in a widespread tendency to subordinate what is important to what is sensational in the news—to give readers entertainment in preference to facts, to give them stories that titillate their curiosity rather than stories that challenge their intellects...

...yet those most prone to view this trend with alarm rarely press with much vigor for the solution of local problems at the local level...

...When he was defending Thomas Paine against a libel charge in a British court long ago, Thomas Erskine said: "In this manner, power Has reckoned in every age...

...This concept of the press was expressed by Americans even before they became a nation...

...First, it is supposed to give the people of a democratic society the information about the world they live in and about what their government is doing without which they cannot possibly, in any real sense, be self-governing...

...At any rate, the obligation of the press to cultivate an informed citizenry is not diminished by the difficulty of doing so...

...Nevertheless, however "responsible" such cooperation may be, it is a far cry indeed from the kind of check on governmental conduct which the press was originally supposed to provide...

...On the domestic scene, editorial pages can be credited, if you like, with a good deal of vigor and bite in criticizing the more conventional forms of corruption in government...

...In appraising the press as a guardian of individual liberty—as a censor of the government—one may fairly ask what it has done to arrest the institutionalization of a Federal employe security program which relies for its condemnation of American citizens on hearsay information from faceless informers...

...and they have at least as large a part to play in shaping national policy respecting those events...

...Patriotically, it recognizes that criticism of official policy might be taken by enemies of the United States as evidence of internal dissension and division...

...But nowadays criticism of the government seems, like politics, to stop at the water's edge...

...It has been strengthened by time and buttressed by popular reverence...

...This is the area which concerns the news of political controversy and national security...

...They need not only hard news about these events but they need also interpretive and informed comment about them...

...There is always a danger, moreover, that self-restraint will lead unconsciously into lethargy or indifference...

...In a crisis, the press rallies to the support of the government...

...But it is a reasonable generalization, I think, that American newspapers are not now doing as much as they could do, and must do if democracy is to survive, to give the American public an understanding of the complex circumstances and developments concerning which they have to make fateful decisions as to national policy and action...

...Secrecy and security are not necessarily synonymous...

...To the founders of the Republic, freedom of the press meant a simple thing—independence of the government...

...But one can reasonably ask whether it furthers the function for which the press was given its extraordinary grant of freedom from governmental control...

...Generalizations about the American press are almost certain to be misleading...

...And no one ought to be surprised if it behaves at times altogether irresponsibly...

...J. R. Wiggins, who has long led the American Society of Newspaper Editors in its fight for freedom of information, stated the situation simply in his book of a few years ago, Freedom or Secrecy: "To diminish the people's information about government is to diminish the people's participation in government...

...but I think it more accurate to say that newspapers get the readers they deserve...

...Some have been noble at one time and ignoble at another— and I am conscious, of course, that the distinction between the two must be a matter of individual judgment and point of view...

...and in many newspapers it is reported with remarkable vividness and journalistic craftsmanship...

...This often makes interesting reading...

...I think that American newspapers are in little danger of having freedom of the press taken away from them...

...If newspapers are to continue to enjoy their privileged position, they must justify it by a recognition of noblesse oblige...

...Nowhere in the United States has the press been muzzled by the government or had conformity forced upon it...

...But it deprives the country of the kind of conflict of opinion by which the national policies of a democratic people are supposed to be hammered out...

...It is supposed, in short, to speak for the people and against the government...

...A great deal has been said concerning the irresponsibility of American newspapers...

...Although newspapers are big business enterprises operated for private profit, and although they are, in some degree, subsidized by the government through the grant of second-class mail benefits, the Constitution shields them from any form of official interference or regulation...