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An Almost Absolute Right
| Article
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13966 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1988 |
2,829 Words |
| Author
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Joseph C. Spear
Joseph C. Spear, an experienced investigative reporter, has
been a member of Jack Anderson's staff for 16 years. He is the
author of Presidents and the Press: The Nixon Legacy (MIT
Press, 1984). |
Ask a conservative ideologue, such as constitutional expert Bruce Fein, whether the public has an inherent "right to know" about the activities of government, and you might receive this response: "There is certain information that ought to be kept secret, that people don't have an automatic right to know."
Ask an authority at the other end of the political continuum, American University law professor Herman Schwartz, for example, and you could be told that information is necessary "to hold the government accountable," and thus the right to know is "clearly implicit in the nature of democracy."
Ask the same question of an average attorney, and you may find yourself swirling in a stream of legal patois: "Right of access to courts... access to criminal depositions... gag orders... sunshine laws... Press-Enterprise v. Superior Court of California..."
Ask a journalist in the trenches, and you'll hear a lot of talk about the exigencies of the profession, deadline pressures, and publishing decisions being based on gut instinct. Give that same journalist time to compost his thoughts and you'll get this reasonable response: "Ours is a government of the people. We are sovereign; those who work in government are our servants. We have a right to know what they are doing; they have no right--except when the collective security is genuinely in jeopardy--to restrict or withhold information. It is this principle that the First Amendment embodies and protects, and it is the bedrock upon which our participative system rests."
Though sagacious, this opinion is not universally accepted. In a 1974 speech at Yale, the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, usually given to expansive interpretations of the First Amendment, had this to say:
There is no constitutional right to have access to particular government information, or to require openness from the bureaucracy. The public's interest in knowing about its government is protected by the guarantee of a free press, but the protection is indirect. ... The Constitution, in other words, establishes the content, not its resolution.
In varying degrees, these have been the sentiments of our presidents as well. Since 1951, four executive orders have been promulgated to define national security information and to establish rules for classifying it. Each edict called for less official secrecy than the
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