No matter how large (like India) or how old (like the USA) a democracy is, the possibility of a conflict between the government and the Press always exists, especially when it involves a war or a fight against terrorism. In such cases, the government is keen to hide some news to protect national security while the Press is wont to resist, citing its duty to inform the public.
Last month, the US media was agog with the news that the US Justice Department had secretly obtained and checked the telephone records of the biggest US news agency, the Associated Press (AP), in an effort to find out who from the White House had leaked information to the agency. The government apparently wanted to suppress the story about a foiled terror attack by al-Qaida hatched in Yemen until the double agent, who tipped the government, was safe. And the investigators wanted to find out who had leaked the information to AP. So the government sub-poenaed records covering a two month period in early 2012 from mobile phones of at least five reporters and an editor and also the AP offices in New York, Washington and Connecticut. AP called the action a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into news gathering.
President Obama through his spokesman said he doesn’t believe that a reporter should be prosecuted for doing his or her job, but maintained that he can’t risk the country’s security in case of unauthorized leaks of classified information.
This conflict is not new. Ironically, 67 years ago, the same news agency had fired its reporter, Edward Kennedy, when he reported the news scoop that the World War II had ended. He had reported, a day ahead of his competitors, that the Germans had surrendered unconditionally in France, thus ending WWII. But because US President Truman and British Prime Minister Churchill wanted to suppress the news of the surrender, AP “publicly rebuked” Kennedy and fired him. Last year, AP finally apologized for the incident, but Kennedy had already died without vindication by then.
The tension between the White House and the Press really began in a big way in 1971 during the Vietnam War, when an expert hired by the US Defense Department, the Pentagon, was driven by his conscience to reveal the conclusions of his study that the Vietnam War was never winnable to begin with, and that there was no reason for the US to get involved. The expert was Daniel Ellsberg and the papers he gave to the New York Times to publish came to be known as the famous “Pentagon Papers”. President Nixon and his administration went to court, which ordered NYT to cease publication. They cited national security, but NYT said the public has every right to know in a democracy how the war is really going. The NYT won the battle. So the media played a vital role in the Vietnam War, shaping public opinion which eventually ended the war.
Daniel Ellsberg, hated by some, but undeterred, said in a recent interview: “Don’t make my mistake. Don’t do what I did. Don’t wait until a new war has started in Iran, until more bombs have fallen in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, Libya, Iraq or Yemen. Don’t wait until thousands more have died, before you go to the Press and to Congress to tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or crimes or internal projections of costs and dangers. Don’t wait 40 years for it to be declassified, or seven years as I did for you or someone else to leak it.”
However, the whole debate and the White House defeat in the NYT case had a profound impact on President Nixon. He created a list of more than 60 US media persons who would be considered enemies of the White House. The list was topped by famous syndicated columnists Jack Anderson, Mary McGrory, Carl Rowan, Gary Wills, James Reston of NYT, Warren Unna of the Washington Post and Marvin Kalb of CBS, among others.
The victory of the Press in the legal battle over the Pentagon Papers emboldened the news media, but the Nixon administration became more insecure and responded by creating the “Plumbers Unit”, a small group of White House insiders, to deal with leaks of classified information to the Press (Notice the tricky name of the unit – ‘plumbers’ to fix the ‘leaks’). It was the same unit that later triggered the huge Watergate scandal, the largest White House leak in history, that ultimately led to President Nixon’s resignation.
For both the news media and the public, revelations about the Watergate burglary and the ensuing endless cover-up confirmed doubts that the Americans harboured about the Federal government. But as the Press challenged top officials they had once treated with deference, and as it probed their characters and personal lives, many Americans started resenting the Press too.
The conflict continues even today. Governments continue to conceal and, on occasion, prevaricate. And, on behalf of the people, the Press continues to probe about the government for any lies and half truths. Of course, the Press can’t do it unless there are whistle-blowers inside the government, who leak crucial information for the good of the people and the democracy.
(Author/analyst Ravi M. Khanna has covered South Asia for Voice of America from Washington and New Delhi for more than 24 years.)
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