THE PRESS AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST
Hamilton, Ladd
The press and the public interest Ladd Hamilton On April 16, ABC News reported that the Supreme Court shortly would announce its ruling in the case of Herbert v. Lando, and reported what the...
...Kenneth Auchincloss, the managing editor of Newsweek, was speaking in a panel discussion of the issue and he said...
...That's what happened...
...Members of the Politburo seldom are upset by what they see in Pravda, and Pravda almost never slips even a drop of poison into the socialistic process...
...When a reporter asks an embarrassing question of a corporation executive, say, or a county commissioner, he often is told that to put that information out would serve no useful purpose...
...He should simply have said, "I don't have to show that it serves any public interest...
...ABC News that night even told its audience who had written the majority opinion: Associate Justice Byron White...
...The Supreme Court is the public's business and we will all be better off if reporters are free to intrude and to probe and to embarrass, even when little is gained by it, than if they are expected to tell us only what somebody thinks is good for us...
...As far as most people were concerned, that was the end of it, but within the news business it has stirred a debate that still is going on and may well outlast the Chief Justice...
...Our answer should be that it doesn't have to serve a useful purpose...
...The editor of The Progressive described at length the great good that the article would have done, and that was a mistake...
...The question Reston and many others ask is, what did it gain in public awareness, and what did anybody win...
...James Reston of The New York Times started it with a column in which he castigated ABC News for what he considered an unnecessary intrusion into the inner sanctum of the Supreme Court, for no good reason...
...Chief Justice Warren Burger was furious...
...But since when does something have to be gained...
...vance of the court's announcing it...
...The press and the public interest Ladd Hamilton On April 16, ABC News reported that the Supreme Court shortly would announce its ruling in the case of Herbert v. Lando, and reported what the ruling would be: that a public figure who is the plaintiff in a libel suit may question the defendant about his state of mind and his motivations when preparing the challenged article or newscast...
...Reston was right: No public interest was served by putting a spy inside the Supreme Court for the sole purpose of providing a scoop for a network news department that provided no information the public wouldn't have known anyway before the week was out...
...A good example of a newspaper that sets out to serve the public interest, as its editors see it, is Pravda...
...Did anybody really need to know how the court was going to rule in Herbert v. Lando two days before the ruling was announced...
...Of all the arguments for suppressing its article on the H-bomb, the worst was put forward by — you won't believe this — a magazine editor...
...But what is the public harm, and where indeed is any poison...
...The other has been summarized by George Watson, vice president and Washington bureau chief of ABC News...
...I put it crudely, but that is the gist of one of the arguments in this debate...
...Editors frequently are asked what useful purpose it serves to report that so-and-so has been charged with shoplifting...
...Who says the newspapers and broadcasters should report only what somebody believes would serve the public interest...
...I'd like to ask the people from The Progressive exactly what was their editorial judgment in the original decision to publish the...
...What serves the public interest in the long run is a press that does not set out to serve the public interest...
...And that night, on April 17, it reported what the Supreme Court's decision would be in yet another case and told who had written the majority opinion in that one...
...Watson replied, "In this particular instance, Mr...
...The Government has to show that it would do sure, grave, direct, immediate and irreparable harm...
...article, before you got into a great legal hassle...
...What this means is that somebody would rather not see it in the paper...
...What public interest did you think was served by this article...
...Watson makes the better case...
...I agree with Reston that nothing was gained by getting the Chief Justice mad and that probably nothing was gained by reporting two decisions of the Supreme Court before the court announced them...
...our job is to report the news, not judge it...
...The public interest, if there is such a thing, is served by encouraging the full flow of information concerning public business...
...Reston wrote that ABC's reporting of the decision before it was announced "obviously serves no public purpose and is a drop of poison in the whole democratic process...
...Reston may be unable to detect any tangible public good achieved by reporting a decision in adLadd Hamilton is day managing editor of the Lewiston, (Idaho) Morning Tribune, in which this column appeared in somewhat longer form...
...ABC reported the story again the next morning...
...The next day, the Supreme Court announced its decision and it turned out that ABC News had been correct on all counts...
...Consider the case of The Progressive...
...Reporter Tim O'Brien had found a leak in the court's bureaucracy...
...To believe that the news should serve some public interest is to believe in censorship...
...He set out to find the leak and within a few days had fired one of the employes of the court...
Vol. 43 • August 1979 • No. 8
