Stop the Presses: An Old Government Cry

Bush administration officials, according to a recent report in The New York Times (which must have been “leaked,” since it was not announced) are considering a plan to escalate their battle against leaks of classified material. Now, they reportedly want to bring criminal charges not only against the government employees who divulge the secrets but also against the journalists who disseminate the information to the public.

Such a policy is described as a departure from the “informal rules of engagement” governing relations between the government and the news media. But the history of journalism in America suggests otherwise. In fact, the government has attempted to rein in an independent press time and again, beginning even before the Revolution itself.

The law the Bush administration is reportedly considering using against the press is the Espionage Act of 1917, passed by Congress shortly after the U.S. entered the war in Europe and signed by Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The law was passed in a climate of wartime hysteria, fueled by suspicion about the loyalty of the large German population living in the United States.

The Espionage Act was amended in 1918 with a series of new sections that were called the Sedition Act. (Those amendments were repealed in 1921, but the original Espionage Act remains on the books.) The laws were used by federal prosecutors to bring charges not only against spies but also against a host of Wilson’s critics and war dissenters – notably Eugene V. Debs, who was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for giving a speech in which he expressed support for resisting the military draft.

Throughout American history, the government and the press have been at odds over the proper balance between presidential power and press freedom. President Bush is renewing this struggle, and it is time for the press to push back.

Too many Americans have the view that press freedom is some kind of birthright, that it is a status we all get to enjoy without having to do anything to protect or strengthen it. But the record of the past 300 years indicates that this is not the case.

We have had a record of regularly recurring threats to press freedom. These date from the attempts by the English authorities to crack down on the rebels plotting the American Revolution, to the original Sedition Act of 1798 (used by the John Adams administration to jail editorial supporters of Thomas Jefferson), to the crackdowns of the World War I era, to the current initiatives by the Bush administration to investigate and jail journalists.

In fact, whatever degree of freedom the press has is the result of a struggle, not a foreordained declaration. Every generation or so, Americans find they must renew this struggle to defend freedom of the press.

In the present climate, how can this essential liberty – the one that the founders intended as a guarantor of all our other liberties – be defended?

Much of the burden will fall on the news media themselves. Some media outlets, of course, are not interested in a fight under any circumstances. Some would rather support the administration, and they are (of course) free to do so. Others might like to defend their freedoms but are afraid, especially those broadcasters who are licensed by the FCC or the giant conglomerates who are answerable to their stockholders.

That leaves the struggle for press freedom to a dwindling number of independent media. They face a powerful adversary in the federal government, but they might find a weapon if they reach back into press history for a tactic that served Jefferson’s generation very well.

In the years leading up to the break with England, the colonial rebels faced a practical problem: how could they express their views or advance their plans when publication of those ideas was an offense to the Crown punishable as a crime?

One technique was to use pseudonyms, or pen names, so that the British authorities could not be sure who was responsible. In the Revolutionary era, many writers used pseudonyms, and they often looked to their heroes from the ancient Roman republic for names such as Publius or Cato, which they used instead of their real names.

Nowadays, if journalists need to resort to pseudonyms once again, they have a storehouse of names from the heroes of own early Republic to drawn upon. American history provides plenty of suggestions:

-- “Isaiah Thomas,” a colonial printer who had to flee Boston in 1775 because he thought the Redcoats were coming to seize his printing press and prevent him from publishing his aptly named newspaper, The Massachusetts Spy,

-- Or “Benjamin Franklin Bache,” a grandson of Ben Franklin and critic of John Adams, who died in prison in 1798 while awaiting trial under the country’s first Sedition Act.

--Or, there’s always the author of the First Amendment himself, “Thomas Jefferson.”

There is no lack of examples. The question is whether there are any willing to follow.