The Media

By TOM LITTLEWOOD

The letter, from a California computer programmer, gave a detailed account of the eight separate explosions that he said must occur almost simultaneously to set off a hydrogen bomb.

At issue here is a principle dear to the news business and to First Amendment supporters. It is that, under the First Amendment, there can be no "prior restraint" of publication; the news media, that is, can be held accountable for what they disseminate but the government cannot suppress the disclosure of information secret or otherwise. Throughout American history all previous withholding of sensitive material had been with the voluntary agreement of the press.

In this instance the government contends that the information printed by the Tribune could only have come from classified secret sources and that its publication endangers the national security by schooling uninformed nations in the production of H-bombs. If these allegations are true, the publisher of the Tribune could be subject to imprisonment for up to 20 years under the criminal provisions of the Atomic Energy Act and other laws. The Tribune denied that any of the information had come from secret sources and argued that the secrecy system had been used by the government "to cover up its own ineptitude and its own inconsistent policies toward classification of documents."

Whether prior restraint is a constitutional question likely to arouse the American people is highly doubtful. It is especially unfortunate that the issue had to be raised right now by a liberal magazine engaged in what might be interpreted as a contribution to nuclear proliferation — and by a magazine (unlike the Tribune) which made the mistake of submitting the article to a government agency for clearance before deciding that such clearance was unneeded.

Remember McCormick
Regardless of the ideological issues, the Tribune has been willing before to boldly risk public displeasure when government suppression of the news is involved. At the start of World War II, Col. Robert R. McCormick published the U.S. naval plans for the Pacific, although this was more to annoy the hated President Roosevelt than for any other reason.

McCormick could and did thumb his nose at everybody — including his own readers. Today's editors dare not do that. Market research is a major cost item in many newspaper budgets. The reader is being courted and psychoanalyzed as never before. Newspapers are considered arrogant, strident, remote from the lives of their readers — "the voice of asperity and sterile detachment," in the words of Dayton (Ohio) editor Arnold Rosenfeld.

"Readers see us as moral vigilantes," said Rosenfeld, "driven only by the desire to sell newspapers. We protest our. meritorious intentions. But the public does not understand." As human beings, newspaper people "ought to be terribly burdened, haunted, by the very real consequences of our decisions to publish. We ought to live uncomfortably with the fact that our journalism does damage."

Rosenfeld was not thinking about the H-bomb article. It is reasonable, however, to assume that many Tribune readers might have viewed the publication as something more than a chest-thumping demonstration in favor of the First Amendment.

A willing judiciary
What this all adds up to, unhappily, is a diminution of the First Amendment rights of all of us. For the judiciary is ready and willing to move against the press at every sign of faltering public support. Even before the prior restraint imposed on The Progressive, the courts were seriously narrowing the rights and privileges of the free press. Media spokesmen habitually see the sky falling in on them just about anytime a judge makes a decision that is adverse to their interests. As a consequence, the news-consuming public has difficulty distinguishing the unconscionable judicial acts from those merely treating the press like other people.

Unconscionable some of them are. Journalists can be sent to jail for refusing to identify the sources of their confidential information, turning over their notes, or submitting to a police search of their newsroom files. In Illinois, a law was enacted protecting newsrooms from "unreasonable" searches and seizures. But there is still no law spelling out public access to public records. And in the most dubious of all decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court has invited judges to exclude reporters from certain judicial proceedings.

34/ December 1979/ Illinois Issues