The Suppression of News

by JAMES S. POPE

1

IF ONE condition for a democracy can be set ahead of all others, it is this: the people, being the rulers, must receive complete and accurate information. But within the past year a sharp and critical disagreement has been found to exist between the country’s newspaper editors and the officeholders who contrive much of its news. How much should the people know?

Of course, every newspaperman Is used to a nominal tussle over news that reflects some discredit on elected or employed public officials — whelher they operate in the city hall, the county courthouse, the stale capitol, or in Washington. If t he story is going to make the governor or the mayor or the county judge, or the major general, squirm with embarrassment, then the reporter expects to dig a little harder than usual to get it. This is a conflict as old as gov ernment and news of government.

But the conflict has gone far beyond that simple ceremonial. Only recently have most editors begun to realize that these familiar little guerrilla skirmishes now are part of a broad-scale offensive against freedom of information — against the basic principle of the citizen’s right to know, so that he may govern himself.

The truth is that many men in office now propagate a contrary creed, which holds that it is dangerous for news of government to leak out in any natural, unprocessed form. The fountainhead of this cult is Washington, but devotees dot the laud.

No concept in our ideology is more important and more widely misunderstood than Freedom of Information. It is not by any means Freedom of the Press. It is an implication, but little more, of that primary freedom. The right to publish journals of news without government interference was guaranteed in the First Amendment. Freedom of (he Press exists. It is tangible, dynamic, well protected in general by courts and by public opinion.

But Freedom of Information is just an idealistic first cousin. It is a hope. If we forget it fora while, it can be stolen away, because it has never been nailed down. It is chiefly an inference; an inference that if the Founding Fathers wanted government to keep its hands off the press, they expected that government to be conducted openly. Otherwise, a free press would be unable to serve its intended purpose.

Few public officials would dare challenge Freedom of the Press, yet they can weaken and perhaps eventually destroy il if they are allowed to strangle Freedom of Information. The truth is that we can have a completely legalistic Freedom of the Press and at the same t ime lose a vital part of the in formation which gives this freedom any meaning. We can lose it through a combination of guileful concealment and coloration by public servants, and just plain apathy among the workers of the press.

In the ultimate. Freedom of Information is just about this: the freedom to fight for it. This conclusion. coupled with a warning that it is past (ime to start the fight, was presented to the American Society of Newspaper Fditors a few weeks ago by its Committee on Freedom of Information. This committee could not escape learning how widespread curtailment of information has become. It received appeals for aid against secret ive officialdom from papers large and small; from the little editor being denied basic information by bis police chief to the big editor who got bruised by the Bureau of Internal Bevenue.

The committee is si ill carrying on a heavy correspondence with scores of editors and public officials, probing, discussing, expounding, disputing. Out of this exchange, two significant factors in the war for knowledge have assumed clear shape. They are new factors in several respects, but certainly in the sense that they have far outgrown their image in the public mind. One is the spreading philosophy that the inside man, the head of a department or agency, knows better than anyone else what the public should be told, and must screen his records accordingly. The other is the technique of news control itself, which now enlists more than 50,000 workers in the Federal Government alone. This is a competent estimate. Editor & Publisher said in its issue of April 7, 1951, that the exact number of publicity agents in the Federal Government is not known, and that the Bureau of the Budget had declined the job of finding out unless given a special appropriation from Congress.

If it is questioned whether these twin forces really are new, a good witness is Harold L. Cross, the noted newspaper lawyer who has been retained by the A.S.N.E. to make the first comprehensive survey of laws and decisions affecting access to public records, He said in his interim report: —

This Society . . . had well served the profession of journalism for a quarter of a century before need arose to create a committee with the prime function to strike down barriers to access to public records and proceedings. For a decade longer I practiced newspaper law without encountering a serious case of refusal of access. Now scarcely a week goes by without a new refusal. The last five years brought more newspaper lawsuits to open records than any previous twenty-five.

2

THERE is just cause for concern, not only about the national government but about the grass roots of state and community news. The Governor of Arizona became worried about criticisms of his Land Commissioner and asked the Attorney General to investigate. The Attorney General’s report so moved the Governor that he fired the Land .Commissioner; but he refused to let the Arizona Daily Star or any other representative of the public take a look at the report. The state claimed this report was not a public record, though it was made by, on, and to a public official. The Star took up the challenge and is still fighting for a court decision which will pry open this official secret.

There has been trouble in New England. A public school board has a peculiarly vital public function, yet the board in Torrington, Connecticut, repeatedly denied admittance to its meetings or access to its minutes to a reporter for the Waterbary American. Court action forced the minutes out, but it may well be asked: In what atmosphere of medieval repression does a public body reside when it compels its public to go to court to obtain basic information ?

The trouble is that many small papers do not have the resources, the self-confidence, the legal assistance needed to fight successfully for news rights that are denied by men of influence in the community. Not all editors by any means are in a posit ion to antagonize a board of education. That is why the battles which are fought and won are so important : they go into the record and into the psychology of free information.

Yonkers, New York, offers the interesting problem of what is meant by “vital” when dealing with vital statistics. The City Clerk does not consider them vital to the people of the community. Marriage licenses, especially, are guarded jealously by the Clerk. In March the Herald-Statesman complained editorially: —

We find that in January the City Clerk’s office issued a total of 123 marriage licenses. The number published by the He raid-Statesman (all the paper could get) was 63. In February, the official total was 40; our total for publication was 15. This means that 62.5 per cent of the marriage licenses were withheld from the public last month.

In Norwich, Connecticut, the Police Commission decided to close its records. The Norwich Bulletin learned of a car theft, recovered the car, and printed a story about it before the police had admitted that a car was gone. This is known as the Page One method of breaking up news blocks, and requires no wasted time in court. The police commissioners had red faces and soon hoisted a white flag.

Direct defiance of secretive pract ices is almost invariably effective. The Iowa State Tax Commission issued regulations that reporters must file requests for information in writing, and all department heads must submit the material to the commission for approval before release. Such delaying actions, which frequently survive the timeliness of the news, are greatly cherished by such commissions. The avowed purpose was to ensure that “the public be correctly informed.”

Led by Kenneth MacDonald, Executive Editor of the Des Moines Register and Tribune, Iowa newspaper editors protested to the commission that “the effect of your order will be to establish news censorship over all the activities of an important branch of our Government.” The Commission Chairman proposed a conference “to develop a satisfactory and adequate press policy,” to which Mr. MacDonald astutely replied: “I feel the proper course is to do away with the rules instead of conferring about them.” They were done away with.

The Supreme Court of Rhode Island in, as Harold Cross put it, “its second opinion redolent of musty technicalities,” dismissed a proceeding in w hich the Providence Journal has for more than two years sought access to the most public of all information: tax-abatement records in the city of Pawtucket. It took a resounding decision of a federal court, which ignored the musty technicalities and went back to the freshness of the Bill of Rights, to break the barrier. But Pawtucket has appealed this decision.

Now let it not be assumed that the enemies of free information are tongue-tied, unable to explain and justify their tampering with the structure of American freedom. Reasons are given for most secrecies. In the Pawtucket case, for example, a member of the City Council declared: —

No Republican councilman will repudiate The Providence Journal because The Providence Journal and the Republican Party are synonymous. As long as there is a fighting Democrat left, in Pawtucket we will fight The Providence Journal Company.

The Attorney General of Michigan, Stephen J. Roth, is another public servant who understands why information is concealed: and he explained it wilh Some eloquence to a Michigan Editorial Conference: —

I think the less concern you have with what you are entitled to under the law the better off you’re going to be; because I think you’ll discover or have discovered iu your experience that public officials unless they are interested in political suicide are going to be pretty circumspect on letting you take a good look at what public business is being conducted.

The virtues of candor are understood also by Jim Haggerty, guardian of information in Governor Dewey’s office. When asked at a New York State Associated Press meeting if one purpose of off-therecord conferences was not to tie up news, he replied, “Oh, sure.” The “when” is as important as the “what” to the manipulators of information. If reporters get too close to a story the executive considers premature, he gives them part of it “off the record,” thus damming the news until he is ready to open the gates himself. Resides off-the-record conferences, the tools of control include handouts (the Hoover Commission put the cost to the Federal Government, for research and printing of booklets and bulletins, at $74,829,000 in 1946; current estimates are over a hundred million), directives, regulations (which enforce secrecy without statutory authority in many cases), classifications, executive meetings at which the press is barred, and similar devices.

3

THERE are many sincere and competent men in the huge information force in Washington, but not many refute the axiom that no man is going to release data which will displease or discredit his boss.

Among Washington correspondents, there is remarkable agreement about the departments that do a good information job and those which do not. Of course, their opinion is not beyond challenge. Many correspondents are too lazy to check deeply into stories, and they admire government employees who give them enough to satisfy the home office.

But for what it is worth, a recent survey among some Washington reporters turned up a general endorsement of the Department of Agriculture as having the best information service in the Capital. Compliments were plentiful for the Departments of State and Defense (though both of them suppress vast quantities of information for inadequate reasons). The Justice Department and the Bureau of Internal Revenue won the unpopularity awards. They are wrapped in mantles of inviolability, partly woven by an indulgent Congress and partly selfcreated. They dislike inquiries and habitually rebuff them.

As one correspondent summed it up succinctly: “Justice: this joint is lousy. It’s worth your life to try to pry anything out of officials there. The same goes for the Bureau of Internal Revenue.” And the same goes, by general agreement, for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in recent years. It is no accident that R.F.C. has bred some scandals; secrecy almost invariably breeds them.

The burgeoning executive departments and agencies within the District of Columbia have increased their employees since 1930 from 71,237 to 173,662. In that time, the Washington press corps has increased too; but most of the newcomers have been in the processing field — those who write or broadcast news and comment — rather than in the news-digging field. The miners are si ill greatly outnumbered. For that reason, dependence on handouts has increased to an alarming extent. It may be that newspapers have far too few reporters to hope to cover all the recesses where news can be hidden. It is a danger the press must acknowledge.

All federal offices have constantly before them an inspiring example of news control. The citizens of that lovely village on the Potomac not only cannot vote; they cannot look while their masters, appointed by Congross, transact what elsewhere would bo called public business. The Commissioners of the District of Columbia are not required, as is practically every city council in the free world, to hold open sessions — so they hold them in secret. Outside the Iron Curtain, Washington is one of the few world capitals where the right of the people to know is scorned.

Some federal agencies have created vast areas of secrecy with the blessing of statutes, but many others make their own ground rules as they go.

The Louisville Courier-Journal, interested in the parole from a federal prison of a Louisville character who had been serving a term for income-tax fraud, asked the U.S. Board of Parole for the names of the endorsers of the parole. Apparently these good citizens were willing to help a friend but did not want their friendship known. The Parole Board refused t he information. When the A.S.N.E.’s Committee on Freedom of Information asked for a reason, the board relented and supplied the names. Then George G. Killinger, chairman of the board, wrote: —

In the future . . . desired information will be supplied if, in our opinion, such information is compatible with the welfare of society.

Now that is a ringing phrase, but a very foolish one. The men who created our free institutions put no such restrictions on information, designated no guardians of the public mind. Mr. Killinger’s credo, widely embraced in government, is the altruistic complement of the ultimatum delivered by Attorney General Roth. But whether the intent is good or bad, the public loses. The Committee on Freedom of Information wrote Mr. Killinger: —

Who is to decide what is compatible with the welfare of society? It is decided very easily in the nations which maintain control of all information, and We are sure you do not advocate our adopting their system. The Bill of Rights did not make exceptions to be applied to public officials who might be honest.

Another example of the I-know-betler-than-thepeople policy was expressed for the Bureau of Internal Revenue by its chief counsel, Charles Oliphant. It happened that a good many bars in Albany, Now York, bad formed the habit of adulterating their whisky, and the Knicherboeker News reasonably thought the names of these bars should be known in the community. But the Alcohol Tax Unit, which had investigated and compromised the charges with lines, refused the paper any information, claiming the protection of a departmental regulation. Mr. Oliphant, asked by the Commiltee on Freedom of Information why these deals were not a public record, expressed the opinion that Congress had given the department the authority to control such information by regulation, adding that “the transaction is primarily of interest to the individual and to the bureau.”

That, of course, was poppycock. Any adulteration of food or drink is of concern primarily to the public. And Internal Revenue’s attitude underlines a curious and seldom-challenged Washington practice of creating a special class of law violators: those who offend against the Federal Government. If someone stole your wallet in a bar, you would have him arrested and tried; and he would have no way of suppressing the news about it. But the bartender can rob you in his subtle way, buy immunity from federal officers, and you never know what happened. It is a sort of official blackmail, doubtless encouraging the payment of fines, but not open and honest government. The practice is widely used, of course, in the handling of cases of income-tax evasion, and probably in numerous other transactions of which the public hears nothing — or, for that matter, of which the newspapers hear little or nothing.

The editors who served on the Committee on Freedom of Information were disturbed most, not by any single ease of news suppression they discovered but by the suspicion that each one was but a tiny facet of our ignorance, one scrap of evidence of things not known. They wondered if perhaps the widespread unawareness of concealment, of its scope and variety, was not a bigger story than any of the stories being concealed. Being blind to newsblindness could be fatal to any democracy.

For example, who has seriously challenged the proceedings of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System? Those gentlemen deal with that vital part of our economy, management of money. But they never hold open meetings. Most federal commissions — Trade, Power, Communications— do hold open hearings part of the time. Because the Reserve Board of Governors do not, as an experienced Washington observer has just reminded the Committee on Freedom of Information, “nobody really knows just what the arguments were on which they based their decisions regarding the rediscount rate, or the revising of reserve requirements for banks, or the buying and selling of government securities. The end result is that the Washington correspondents probably know less about our monetary problems than about any of the other problems in Washington. Yet [they are] the most crucial.”

A met hod of news suppression in the Capilal that has proved disturbingly effective, because it is paved with good intentions, is the so-called advisory censorship of the Department of Commerce for businessmen and manufacturers. The service Was conceived to protect secrets that might be of value to a potential enemy in ease of war. Any definition of security gets to be so broad as to proscribe practically any free-flowing news; but the Commerce Department docs not pretend to confine its advice on news suppression to elements of military security. Its advice takes the form of a blunderbuss to shoot down all intelligence about our mobilization, and shows little awareness of the dangers of public ignorance at a time of crisis. A department bulletin thus defines the scope of its service: —

Information falling within the scope of this program includes unclassified (which means no security is involved in the remotest degree] technical data on: advanced industrial developments, production knowhow and technology, strategic equipment, special installations.

Depending on any one man’s interpretation of these sonorous phrases, you have there a formula for blacking out all news about defense production. It is the formula of a timid soul, too ignorant or too lazy to narrow his definitions down to actual securily items, and completely unconcerned about the right of the people who fight the war, and pay the bills, to know what goes on.

How foolish can our fear of news become? One Chamber of Commerce was advised to leave out of a local defense roundup “any information in connection with the national-defense effort.” It has more the sound of dictatorship than of well-meaning government muddling.

The Department of Defense is guilty, too, of failing to think through its security needs, and of using an indiscriminate smoke screen instead. The Mohawk Carpet Mills circulated a handout reporting an order for heavy duck. However, “due to limitations imposed by the military,”they were not free to list either the yardage or the price. The military, challenged by the Committee on Freedom of Information, did not claim the price of duck involved any security. In a tone of self-pity, security experts told their Director of Information that it was a troublesome problem, and they hoped to got “more reasonable rulings" sometime soon. In the meantime, the flow of information is being cuntrolled in this and innumerable other cases by arbitrary and unjustified “rulings,” with no impetus whatever within the government to break these blockades. Outside the field of atomic energy, there is no law forbidding publication of any news about the war any editor can get, if he just has the determination to get it .

4

IN ONE large field, becoming more controversial every day, there is a law. The Federal Government donates monies to the states for public welfare: aid to the aged, the needy blind, and dependent children. A federal statute requires that these welfare rolls be kept secret, and no state can get federal funds without preserving such secrecy. This secrecy provision was legislated back in the fervor of the Rooseveltian reform era. Its greatest weakness, now it is being attacked, is that it was not attacked on any such scale before. In short, there was no adequate public debate on it. In consequence, many citizens and state legislators now are peering at it with suspicion, as something hatched secretly.

Actually, there were some respectable grounds for keeping welfare rolls confidential. As the Federal Security Agency says: —

[The restriction] is designed to prevent the use of such information for political and commercial purposes; to insure efficient administration and to protect recipients from humiliation and exploitation.

This reasoning is based, of course, on a dubious faith that if relief rolls are not made public, Statehouse and county politicians will not know who is on them, and cannot bring pressure for political support.

There are certainly social arguments in favor of protecting relief clients. On the other hand, here is more than $2,000,000,000 a year being disbursed, and no reporter can check on all the reports of fraud that every newspaper receives. Sentiment seems to be growing that the necessity to guard an increasingly huge sum from grafters takes precedence over the right of personal privacy. Indiana has repealed her secrecy law, risking loss of some $22,000,000 of federal funds. Legislat ures in Tennessee, Georgia, Illinois, Florida, and other states have expressed great dissatisfaction with the present policy. Two bills which would destroy the confidential status have been introduced in Congress. If this area of secrecy, which has some justification, is opened up to the public view, the effect will be profound in other agencies which have no law to sanction their concealments.

The Bureau of Unemployment Security keeps its rolls secret by “regulation" lacking specific statutory direction. Here again, there are some valid reasons; and there is also the urgent need for more intensive checks against fraud than the administrative agency itself is likely to provide. Again, more than a billion and a quarter dollars a year is being disbursed, and the public is told just not to worry.

When expenditure of public monies is considered along with secrecy, one agency looms gigantically over alt others — the Atomic Energy Commission. It has more money and more secrecy than our concept of government can comfortably tolerate. And if press and public are somewhat indulgent about areas of perfectly legitimate information which arc being sealed off, it is little wonder they prostrate themselves ridiculously before the august enigma of the atom.

The Committee on Freedom of Information embraced a one-man subcommittee —Paul Block of the Toledo Blade—which did a hardheaded and yet imaginative job of inspecting the realm of atomic secrecy. In brief, Mr. Block’s report said: —

1. Secrecy is intrinsically a dangerous and corrupting thing: it is highly probable that it already has hampered research and development and that it has cost the taxpayers millions in wasted expenditures. While the press must recognize the necessity of some military secrecy, it also must constantly review and question the validity of the A.E.C.’s decisions on what is to be withheld.

2. The reporting of the purely scientific aspects of atomic energy ... is being done adequately by science writers.

3. The press, however, has been guilty of inadequate reporting of many aspects of the atomic energy program not behind official curtains of secrecy. This is because of an awe amounting almost to superstition. A touch of robust scepticism and the ruthless persistence of the police reporter are badly needed.

A robust scepticism is needed in the approach to the whole problem of freely flowing public information. It has been strangely dormant of late, but there are signs of regeneration.