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The responsibilities of a free press

The press in the United Kingdom has been warned that it will face legal action under the Official Secrets Act if it publishes a document that apparently shows how the United States administration was considering an even more savage assault on the media. As reported in the Daily Mirror and other British newspapers before the threat was issued, the document contains references to a conversation between Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George Bush in the summer of 2004. At that time, the occupation forces in Iraq were storming the city of Fallujah and the Qatar-based television network, Al Jazeera, was one of the few media channels that aired footage of the horrendous impact the military operations were having on the civilian population. While U.S. officials had been vehement in their criticism of the network's coverage, the document in question apparently indicates that they were thinking of something more than verbal assaults. Journalists who claim to have read the document reported that Mr. Blair had persuaded Mr. Bush to call off a plan to bomb Al Jazeera's headquarters in Doha. The British press has now been effectively gagged as it could also face contempt of court charges if it delves further into the issue; two persons are under trial for the unauthorised disclosure of the document. The gag order is unlikely to dispel the impression that the Bush administration could indeed have contemplated such an extreme measure. After all, Al Jazeera personnel were killed when U.S. forces bombed the network's offices in Kabul and Baghdad even though their commanders had been provided with map coordinates of these buildings.

What is surprising is that the U.S. press has not followed up on the lead provided by its British counterpart. It is entitled to a measure of freedom that is unknown in almost every other democracy. The U.S. Supreme Court had affirmed in the landmark Pentagon Papers case that the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits "prior restraint" on publication unless the circumstances are truly exceptional. The Court ruled that administration can resort to censorship only when the disclosure of a piece of information will almost certainly cause direct, immediate, and irreparable harm to national security. The press could not be barred from publishing a document that was classified as top-secret and contained references to military operations. It was free to publish such material even at a time when the country was at war and even if the documents had come into its possession via unauthorised channels. Given this latitude, U.S. journalists surely have a responsibility to determine whether the administration had indeed thought of assaulting a news organisation that refused to toe its line. They would do well to remember these words of Justice Hugo Black — "paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell."

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