Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) tells a revealing anecdote about a recent conversation with a colleague during a morning workout in the Senate gym. A campaigner for openness in government, Cornyn was trying to interest a fellow senator in legislation that he was sponsoring along with Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).
The colleague indicated his lack of interest by saying, according to Cornyn, “That’s just a press issue.”
How do you spell “kiss of death?”
Cornyn related that story at a dinner in Washington Monday with the officers and the board of directors of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. It illustrated probably more clearly than anything else could have why the mainstream media (MSM, as some of our critics have dubbed us) feel under siege today.
Nobody likes the MSM, including, it often seems, the MSM themselves. They are too biased; too myopic; too much wedded to long, dull stories; not entertaining enough; too unwilling to admit error; too disconnected from their communities; too arrogant.
Especially too arrogant. They’re always demanding special treatment with shield laws and reporter’s privileges and other exemptions from the normal obligations and inconveniences of citizenship. And they have the nerve after all that to say that they’re acting in the interest of the American people. Why, it’s almost enough to make an ordinary person think that a few of them deserve to be locked up. It just might teach them a little humility.
Ah, but there’s the rub. Because like it or not, John Q. Public can punish the news media only by hurting himself. He must cut off his nose if he would spite his face.
Thanks to the genius of the nation’s founders, the freedom of the press guaranteed by the 1st Amendment belongs not just to journalists, or to the media industry, or to newspaper publishers or to those with the price of admission to some charmed circle.
No, the freedom of the press belongs to “the people.”
That would be the same people, Sen. Cornyn reminded his Monday night audience, whence comes the authority of the government to govern.
So open-government legislation, like the two bills Cornyn and Leahy are pushing in the Senate, are not “just a press issue.”
We in the news media have done ourselves a disservice, I believe, by employing over the years language that, to a casual observer, made it seem as if the 1st Amendment were the possession of our special little fraternity. “Reporter’s privilege.” “Reporter’s shield.”
We’re doing it even now as we campaign for a federal shield law to protect us from the inquiries of zealous–overzealous?–prosecutors like U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald of Chicago in cases like the investigation involving who leaked the name of Valerie Plame, who was an undercover CIA agent.
I happen to think there are powerful substantive reasons to oppose a federal shield law–the invitation to the government to “license” journalists would be well-nigh irresistible. And, as it says in the biblical parable about the man who had one demon cast out only to have it replaced by seven even worse, “our last state [would be] worse than the first.”
But as much as anything else, we in the journalism industry need to understand that our surest refuge from governmental overreaching is with an American people who view a secretive government not as “just a press issue,” but as an intolerable affront to their rights under the 1st Amendment.
