THAT FIRST AMENDMENT

...Mr...

...BROADCASTING AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT: THE ANATOMY OF A CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS, by Harry S. Ashmore...

...Already there is skepticism about efforts to place restrictions on the press in the name of accomplishing other socially valuable goals, such as the recent Supreme Court decision upholding a Pennsylvania law against sex-designated help-wanted ads...

...And with recent events in mind, there is a particular attractiveness to the argument —albeit extreme on the surface—of Harry Kalven, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, in Fear in the Air that an "asymmetrical" interpretation of the First Amendment is now in order: "Free, robust criticism of government, its officers, and its policy, is the essence of the democratic dialectic . . . The Government cannot reciprocally criticize the performance of the press, its officers, and its policies, without its criticism carrying implications of power and coercion...

...Both incidents speak to the same issue: that one of the reasons the First Amendment has survived so . substantially intact over this nation's two centuries is that it has been largely in the comfortable custody of right-thinking, good-living people in the middle of the road...

...6.95...

...Hundreds of people were outraged that a man they considered to be a dangerous demagogue (he had then attained none of the respectability and little of the following that he would have years later) was to be given a prestigious and effective platform for his views...

...Under what circumstances could anyone else turn to the cameras and insist successfully that he be given extra television time beyond an agreed cutoff for a self-serving political declaration...

...The Young Democrats then reversed themselves again, and Wallace spoke after all...

...W. W. Norton...

...but some fear that the American councils could be exploited by the Government and their findings eventually used as a, pretext for press-control legislation...

...He points out that "freedom of the press must be something more than a guarantee of the property rights of media owners" and that the networks, while claiming a special constitutional status, are, like any other big business, accountable only to their stockholders, who care less about program content and public service than about the annual statement of profits...

...planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, among other matters, had been kept from the public with newspaper cooperation, the editors' affidavits pointed out, and so they really could be considered responsible enough to have done the right thing with the Pentagon Papers...

...Only after a vote had gone against hearing Wallace did it occur to the Young Democrats that the incident posed serious questions of freedom of speech...

...THE RIGHT OF ACCESS TO MASS MEDIA, by Jerome A. Barron...

...Seen from that perspective, the Pentagon Papers fight arose in part because the press suddenly rocked an old boat...

...Underneath and in between all this, however, Barron raises some problems worthy of serious attention and sober public consideration...

...It is important to note that this attention to the President and his point of view has not been noticeably diminished by the revelation that the Nixon White House had elaborate plans to harm the press and other "enemies" by exploiting the Federal bureaucracy...

...It was only months later that skeptics began to reread the affidavits as an unintended admission by the establishment press that it had long been coopted by officialdom into a narrow, governmentally defined, view of the "public interest...

...An urgent move was launched to rescind the invitation...

...But if Barron has succeeded in identifying some of the issues and in documenting the difficulty of getting minority views into print and on the air, he has only blinked in passing at another part of the problem: the ease with which the President of the United States can, with a little manipulation, commandeer network time and dominate the front pages...

...After listening to and watching White House messengers and the President's children dispatched to explain their view of the necessary Watergate "perspective," legislators are surely not going to vote to apply the FCC's "fairness doctrine" to the print media, as he similarly proposes...

...proper judgment and concern for "national security" in deciding to print the documents...

...Journalistic historians and communications researchers of the future, looking back on the mid-Twentieth Century, may find this, rather than alleged bias, one of the most serious shortcomings of the media...

...One of the major issues during the conflict over publication of the top secret Pentagon Papers in 1971 was whether the newspapers had exercised FEAR IN THE AIR...

...Indeed, the pendulum may swing the other way for a while...

...Knowledge of American U-2 spy flights over the Soviet Union and U.S...

...Harry S. Ashmore and his colleagues at an already well-publicized conference at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions—from which Fear in the Air is distilled—argue, for the most part, that the blame lies with Richard M. Nixon, a President who has never been on good terms with the press during his long political career, and the people who came to power with him...

...That Barron has found a soft spot is demonstrated by the rather defensive overreactions of television people at the Fear in the Air conference when just such points were brought up...

...That issue underlies these two books, published at a time when the First Amendment suddenly seems to be in great, historic trouble...

...But Jerome A. Barron, a law professor who is now dean of the Syracuse University law school, while careful to dissociate himself from the more hysterical and frightening aspects of the Nixon Administration's notorious "attack strategy," assigns most of the responsibility to the press itself, especially the broadcast media...

...FREEDOM OF THE PRESS FOR WHOM...

...One can only hope future researchers will have available to them a videotape of President Nixon addressing newspaper editors recently at Disney World...

...Barron can be forgiven the fact that many of his proposed improvements in the administration of the First Amendment were in the thinking stage before the Nixon Presidency...

...Many journalists and civil libertarians are intensely suspicious even of the new privately funded and operated "National News Council" and "Council on Press Responsibility and Press Freedom," which are to study media performance and stage public hearings on complaints both by and against the press—a format approved of by Ashmore and his colleagues...

...There would be no sanctions involved, merely a process for review and constructive criticism like the British Press Council...

...Indiana University Press...

...180 pp...

...The camel's nose is in the tent," warned Justice Potter Stewart in dissent...

...The time has come, he says in Freedom of the Press for Whom?, to abandon the romantic, idealistic, laissez-faire notion that public information and opinion can be developed in the marketplace of freely competing ideas, and to breathe an "affirmative dimension" into the First Amendment...

...But the press, knowing what it does about how the Committee for the Re-election of the President faked letters and orchestrated phone calls, would be foolish to accept any system of outside review of how letters-to-the-editor columns are run, as Barron suggests...

...368 pp...

...Barron assails "a new class—the media managers," speaks of the need to "constitutionalize the media" which now have "great power and little accountability," complains of the "single-minded hucksterism" of broadcasters and a "cynical alliance between corporate interests and First Amendment freedoms," and characterizes the press as "an obviously powerful private government, increasingly centralized in ever fewer hands...

...His own zealousness and his apparent need to fill a book by restating the same idea in many different ways seem to have led him to a few rhetorical excesses that could as easily have come from Administration speechwriters...

...Whether it will it or not, it is a critic who carries the threat of the censor...

...And what newspaper of general circulation would have the temerity to handle White House briefings with the same appropriate disrespect it would give any other forum in which so many lies had been told to the public over a period of months...

...Barron has been working on this theme for several years, and his 1967 article in the Harvard Law Review is regarded as the seminal statement of the new movement for a "right of access" to the media (a fact he does not let the reader forget, for he quotes back virtually every court case that has ever quoted him...

...Ungar is a fellow of the Adlai Stevenson Institute in Chicago, on leave from The Washington Post, for which he is a staff writer...

...Public opinion polls now say that citizens are more inclined to trust the press than the Nixon Administration (hardly a compliment to the press, under the circumstances) and that the public has come around to favor the right of journalists to protect their sources...

...What network, in this time of intimidation and careful scrutiny of the media, would have dared to cut the President off at that point...

...8.95...

...He is the author of "The Papers & The Papers: An Account of the Legal and Political Battle over the Pentagon Papers...

...Perhaps the most successful argument advanced by the editors in Federal court in their own defense was that on countless prior occasions they had learned about sensitive defense secrets and other sensitive information, but had, either on their own or at the request of government officials, withheld publication...

...The Government simply cannot be another discussant of the press's performance...

...There, of course, it was usually safe and only rarely tested...