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An Almost Absolute Right
| Article
# : |
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
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