BCT Editorial – 3/20/06

This page was last updated on March 20, 2006.

Salutes & Boots; Editorial; Beaver County Times; March 20, 2006.

Below is a detailed critique of the subject editorial.

“Boot: To the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office and the state Supreme Court for further restrictions of the First Amendment right to freedom of the press.  The Associated Press reports the attorney general’s office seized four newsroom hard drives at the Intelligencer Journal of Lancaster as part of an investigation into alleged leaks by a county coroner.  The attorney general’s office is investigating whether Lancaster Coroner G. Gary Kirchner gave reporters his password to a secure law-enforcement Web site.  Kirchner has denied doing so.  The Supreme Court gets booted for denying the newspaper’s challenge to the search.  The seizure is part of a trend at the state and federal level to encroach on First Amendment freedoms.”

[RWC] Before I begin, here in its entirety is what the First Amendment says about freedom of the press: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press …”  Nowhere else in the Constitution and its amendments is the press mentioned.

Here’s an example showing what this editorial is really trying to claim.  A government official leaks national security secrets to two people, a news reporter and a non-reporter.  The non-reporter could be someone like you or me.  The editorial claims the First Amendment says it’s OK for the government to require the non-reporter to testify in an investigation and to subpoena relevant documents possessed by the non-reporter, but it is not OK to require the same of the reporter.

As you can read, the First Amendment grants no special treatment to members of the press and this is how courts have always ruled.

In fairness, this is one of the few issues on which most news outlets agree, whether they lean to the left or right.

Nowhere was the illogic of this position more in the spotlight than during the Valerie Plame investigation, and it put most of the mainstream media in a conflicting situation.  The mainstream media kept screaming for an investigation, while at the same time claiming the only witnesses – the reporters to whom Plame’s identity was allegedly leaked – could not be compelled to testify and could not have their notes, et cetera subpoenaed.  If you can’t require the only witnesses to testify, how can you investigate an alleged crime, let alone prosecute it?