THE PRESS AND NUCLEAR 'SECRETS'
The press and nuclear 'secrets' A silent pact between the media and the Government excludes the people Nat Hentoff There was a dark, closing chord of dangers to come, but the main text of The...
...Emphasis added...
...The Progressive broke that spell, making the Government look foolish as it did so (with the grand help, of course, of Charles Hansen and the Madison Press Connection...
...That is a very long way for Editor & Publisher to have come...
...On September 19, The Washington Post sourly advised the Government to go ahead and prosecute those who had published the Hansen letter because otherwise the deterrence provisions of the Atomic Energy Act would be revealed "as a sham...
...The May/June Columbia Journalism Review noted that the reason the secrecy provisions of the Atomic Energy Act had not been invoked in a Government prosecution of journalists until now was that before Morland, no journalist had tested the boundaries, let alone the constitutionality, of those of the press out of its "silent understanding" with the Government so that there will be a good deal more reporting on nuclear weapons, and far less acceptance of the Government's word about what information is "properly" being withheld under the Atomic Energy Act...
...An economically marginal publication spends $200,000 in legal fees to pick up a handful of new subscribers...
...This was the same magazine that, months ago, condemned The Progressive for instigating "a bad case that will make bad law...
...I hasten to explain that Tucker meant the tribe of journalists...
...Several officials of daily newspapers told me in the spring — although not for attribution — that it was all a circulation stunt...
...We have had historical periods when the policy-makers didn't bother telling the electorate what they were doing, and others when much of the public was not enfranchised to know...
...After all...
...I am, however, rather heartened and much astonished by an editorial, "Not So Secret Secrets," in the September 22 Editor & Publisher, the trade magazine of the newspaper industry...
...The editorial did not say...
...And that is why there ought to be widespread testing of the Act which, despite the dropping of the case against The Progressive, is still intact...
...To The Charlotte News, the editors of The Progressive were being "reckless in the extreme...
...Expansion into the grave...
...Getting back to Editor & Publisher's September 22 editorial, that usually all-too-respectable magazine actually suggested that those "newspapers of general circulation" that "belatedly" backed The Progressive with amicus curiae briefs in its court battle might have been "more demonstrative in their support, like the Chicago Tribune.'1'' In other words, there should have been mass press defiance of the Government and the Atomic Energy Act...
...But it was as if a wake were going on, and not an Irish one...
...The Times, however, quickly came around...
...Morland and The Progressive did more than anyone else in the past thirty years to expose the dangerous game of fake secrecy that has kept us so ignorantly vulnerable to Star Chamber decisions about nuclear affairs...
...This case, said The Post, is "a real First Amendment loser...
...Sure, it had been scooped by the small paper in Madison, but the Tribune went ahead anyway in an act of First Amendment solidarity because the Justice Department was now growling about possible criminal prosecution of the Press Connection for printing Hansen...
...The San Francisco Examiner agrees: "It was a test of the limits of the right of publication that ought never to have been posed in the first place...
...Louis Post-Dispatch: "Although the danger from H-bombs is real enough, it will not be met by stifling a free press, but by striving for disarmament...
...The Los Angeles Times, which until then had read as if James Madison were editing its editorial page, keened that this is "the wrong issue, at the wrong time, in the wrong place," and practically begged the magazine to negotiate with the Government...
...Its first editorial on the case, on March 11, took a "balanced" view...
...Meanwhile, The Washington Post, its own Watergate experiences notwithstanding, continued to trust the Government — pushing the Carter Administration line that the Morland article contained secret data and would accelerate nuclear proliferation...
...but certain other big-time dailies remained so censorious of The Progressive that when Federal District Judge Robert Warren hardened a temporary restraining order into an injunction against the magazine on March 26, he happily noted that "many elements of the press" agreed with him that "the risk is simply too great to permit publication" and that if the case went forward, the Government would win...
...It told the Justice Department it was going to run the document and would not be deterred by any Government threats even though the Justice Department had already obtained a court order to prevent the Daily Californian in Berkeley from printing the same material by Hansen...
...We have accepted what was never accepted before — the decision by government that in the area of public policy with maximum risk and expense, the public shall have a right to know only what the policy-makers decide to tell it...
...In Quill, a journalism magazine, Ben Bagdikian did get to the core of what The Progressive has taught those members of the press who are educable...
...Copyright ® 1979 The Village Voice, Inc...
...The Atlanta Constitution lambasted The Progressive's "arrogance and mindlessness...
...as if the big-time daily newspaper editors were asking, 'What is this obscure little magazine doing, using our press freedom?1 " A lousy 40,000 circulation, and a monthly to boot...
...Ihave focused on the intellectual paralysis of much of the press during this longest period of Government censorship in our history to make a point that goes beyond certain newspapers' cowardice and obtuseness in this instance...
...What happened was that the press had been reacting "normally" on this one issue...
...Tucker ended his meditation: "Give us a few more Erwin Knolls [editor of The Progressive] and that whole, elaborate, delicate house of cards — our freedom of the press — just may come tumbling down...
...Some publications, to be sure, were not panicked by the Government's claim ("proof of which was kept secret under court order) that release of the Morland article would lead to a deadly flowering of H-bombs all over the world...
...ington Post press critic Charles Seib was later to call "a certain snobbishness...
...No evidence is given to support that charge...
...It seemed to The Progressive at the time that not only the nation's most prestigious newspaper but many others as well were engaging in what WashNat Hentoff writes on First Amendment issues for The Village Voice and other publications...
...And The Times made a point of congratulating the Wisconsin magazine and the American Civil Liberties Union for having resisted, all the way, the counsels of surrender which had come even from "some customary defenders of a free press...
...On June 23, Tucker, ever clear of vision, wrote that publishing Mor-land's piece on the H-bomb "would be a crime against humanity...
...The Times concluded in a burst of chutzpah, "a week or two of forced restraint for a monthly journal seems a tolerable price...
...How so...
...The Los Angeles Times did glumly cite the First Amendment in its editorial the week the Government let Morland's article out of its cage...
...And it does a lot more...
...Because "our national security is vital" too, and both The Progressive's piece and the Hansen letter contain information that "could make it easier for a government that already had developed a nuclear-weapons program to make a hydrogen bomb...
...The First Amendment is, of course, not mentioned anywhere in the editorial...
...Two days after the Press Connection, the Tribune did publish the Hansen letter — plain defiance of the Atomic Energy Act by a major newspaper organization...
...On the other hand, misreport-ing the nature of the article by Howard Morland, The Times said, "Maybe a manual on how to build a nuclear bomb" is not protected by the First Amendment...
...This was before the Press Connection crossed the goal line...
...Back off, it kept telling The Progressive, because there is no other way you can win...
...If this was a victory for the First Amendment," said The Los Angeles Times, "we need no more such victories...
...So not all the press, by any means, has begun to understand what this case was all about, and why it should be the first of many...
...But we have not had a period in which the right to know was officially denied as a permanent prerogative of government...
...If you take on the Press Connection, the Tribune said, you have to take us on too...
...Not one of your heavyweight papers...
...Who will be the next Howard Morland...
...If the Government doesn't provide any public proof, why should The Los Angeles Times...
...It was not until May (with the magazine already silenced for two months) that the board of directors of the American Society of Newspaper Editors voted to join in The Progressive's court appeal that the prior restraint be lifted...
...A stunning plan...
...They fear that this Court will rule against The Progressive and the First Amendment will have suffered irreparable harm...
...The Progressive's editor must be a fool or a publicity hound, or both — in any event, a discredit to his tribe...
...For nuclear matters alone, the First Amendment, traditionally, was not operative...
...Well, The Times itself, briefly, had wavered...
...Some days before, however, the formidable Chicago Tribune also got a copy of the Hansen letter...
...Here again is that silent agreement between the Government and the press, which closes out the citizenry...
...Now, Editor & Publisher praises The Progressive for its "persistence...
...this is not a case for the Anti-Defamation League...
...Like who...
...In the piece, "A Most Insidious Case," Bagdikian wrote: "Since Hiroshima, since creation of the military classification system, since the Atomic Energy Act, and since the mutual involvement of government, industry and universities in weapons development, we have, almost without noticing it, drifted toward a more closed society...
...Therefore, according to The Los Angeles Times, the villains in this case are Howard Morland and Erwin Knoll for lacking "wisdom and responsibility" in having invoked the First Amendment to protect their silly selves...
...On the other hand, certain publications have not budged...
...My favorite jeremiad on the disgraceful behavior of The Progressive was written by Carll Tucker, editor and proprietor of The Saturday Review — an analytic thinker who, with each one of his "Back Door" columns, gives the lie to the cynical notion that this is no longer a land of opportunity for rich young men who want to help shape public issues...
...On the one hand, let us be greatly skeptical of any Government move to censor...
...But first, some recent history: The immediate cause of the Justice Department's backing off the case was the publication by the Madison Press Connection on September 16 of an eighteen-page letter by Charles Hansen containing most of the same "secrets" as Morland's article...
...Give the Federal court time to think...
...And the unyieldingly reasonable Hawk Eye in Burlington, Iowa, declared: "Many in the press beg The Progressive to desist voluntarily, not to force the issue to the Supreme Court...
...But the First Amendment will have been damaged as much by retreat out of fear of what the court might say, as it will by what the court does say...
...The Press Connection is an 11,000-circulation daily started two years ago by striking employes of The Madison Capital Times and the Wisconsin State Journal...
...The Progressive was trying to draw attention to itself...
...It is too soon to tell whether other publications will pick up the baton, as it were, from The Progressive...
...The press and nuclear 'secrets' A silent pact between the media and the Government excludes the people Nat Hentoff There was a dark, closing chord of dangers to come, but the main text of The New York Times's lead editorial on September 19 could have been scored for a pride of brass and exultant tympani...
...The First Amendment, through The Progressive, had scored a TKO over the Government...
...Said the St...
...But, though momentarily chagrined, the permanent nuclear Government still brandishes the Atomic Energy Act as its supreme, exclusive authority to keep all nuclear secrets, whether they are secret or not...
...To seek to publish such an article...
...The majority of the press, however, quaked for some time to come...
...This article is reprinted, by permission, from The Village Voice...
Vol. 43 • December 1979 • No. 12
