The Press Has a Job Too : To inform the public, and to earn its faith and trust

The bicentennial of the Bill of Rights finds the press less welcomed than tolerated by the public with which it shares an abiding dependence on the First Amendment. This should not come as a surprise. Thomas Jefferson, who saw America’s new and prized liberty as inextricably linked with freedom of the press, nonetheless characterized the newspapers of his day as “an evil for which there is no remedy.”

The special freedom that the people of the United States can exercise to criticize the government has been reinforced over a distinguished trail of legal opinions and decisions.

But here we are today: Only 65% of Americans in a survey by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression believed that the First Amendment should extend to newspapers, and only 62% thought that it should apply to network television.

A poll by the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press this year found that 57% of Americans said the military should have exercised more control over news coverage of the Persian Gulf War, even though news executives had vigorously protested against blatant Pentagon management of the news.

The uneasy relationship between contemporary journalism and the American public prompted an ominous prediction from Bruce W. Sanford, counsel to the Society of Professional Journalists: “Parameters of press freedom will most likely be redrawn if the press fails to keep the public’s confidence.”

The press has its work cut out if it is to persuade the public that it exercises its hard-won privileges not for its own sake but because democracy depends on freedom of expression.

If the press is not convinced by the glum picture projected by the polls, it need only consider increasingly chilling libel judgments and jury verdicts, and even the admonishments from its own corner: Several former newspaper editors recently have deplored rude and intrusive behavior in the gathering of news.

Although, as a Times Mirror Center survey found, the public is of two minds about the press, the courts, in a string of opinions, have encouraged free expression as intrinsic to the democratic process. Among the opinions are the collaborations on free expression by Supreme Court Justices Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes; Near vs. Minnesota; Bridges vs. California, a contempt case involving Los Angeles Times editorials that was handed down 50 years ago; the Pentagon Papers case, and the famous Sullivan press-freedom decision.

The Sullivan case highlighted public support for freedom of expression as a foundation of this country’s beginnings; it called attention to the public’s rejection of the pernicious Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and James Madison’s assertion in his Report on the Virginia Resolutions that under the Constitution, “The people, not the government, possess the absolute sovereignty.”

But the press is also trying to improve its own credibility by being more forthcoming about admitting mistakes and by hiring newsroom staffs that better reflect the diversity of readers. However, the press has a very long way to go to improve its standing with the American public. The fledgling 1992 presidential campaign will test its relevance for an alienated electorate.

The task of journalists is to convince the public over and over again of the truth understood by Madison and those since who have kept alive the flame of free expression: Democracy depends for its survival on a vigorous, free press.