Newsmen's Rights

Report Outline
Fight over protecting new sources
Relationship of Press and Government
Debate Over Privilege for Journalists
Special Focus

Fight over protecting new sources

Government-Press Battle in Jailing of Reporters

The press and the government have been set on a collision course over a question that poses a constitutional dilemma and holds wide political implications. It is whether members of the press may legally refuse to divulge their confidential sources and information to grand juries and other agencies of government. At least three newsmen have gone to jail in recent weeks for their refusals and others face the same fate. The Supreme Court has spoken on the issue but by no means has settled it. Though declining to provide newsmen immunity from prosecution when they refused to testify, the Court did suggest that Congress or the state legislatures might enact laws offering such protection. These so-called “shield laws” already exist in 18 states in some form or other, and several other states are likely to consider adopting them in the 1973 legislative sessions.

Spokesmen for the press—both print and broadcast—tend to see the jailing of reporters as intimidation and harassment arising from a presidential administration bent on cultivating a climate of public opinion hostile to the press. Those who hold this view recall the tongue lashings that Vice President Spiro T. Agnew gave to the press, implied threats to broadcasters about license renewals, and efforts of the Justice Department to prevent specified newspapers from publishing excerpts from the Pentagon Papers. There have also been instances of policemen posing as reporters and of police harassment of the underground press. Newsmen tend to characterize these tactics as attempts to discredit the news media or enlist the press as an investigatory arm of government.

There are others who regard the matter not in terms of a partisan or ideological dispute between the Nixon administration and sections of the press but rather as the recurrence of an old conflict—a conflict with roots in the Constitution—between law and journalism. The First Amendment's right to freedom of speech and press is often hard to reconcile with some of the other constitutional guarantees. In this case the conflict is with the precept that every American stands equal before the law—and hence none can be exempt from its provisions. It has long been the proud boast of Anglo-Saxon law that no person is too high to escape the obligation of testifying before a grand jury.