Press freedom

This is a very – how shall I put it – delicate weekend to be doing a talk from the United States that's heard in the first place in the British Isles for the obvious reason of next Thursday's General Election. I can hardly believe my own voice when I say that there was a time, and not so long ago either, when a British General Election gave me the cue to talk about the kind of problems of government – inflation, social strain and so on – we all have in common, but this year I hear two warning notes.

The first is an echo from the very long ago but one that sounds loud and clear at this time of the year, especially in the halls and corridors of the British embassy in Washington. It's the echo of the awful hullabaloo that rose across the United States almost a hundred years ago. I talked about it not long ago so I'll now simply throw in a reminder. It was caused by two letters. The first from a man in California writing to the British minister in Washington, in the days when Washington was not important enough to rate an ambassador and the second was the British minister's innocent reply. 

The Californian pretended to be an Englishman who'd been naturalised as an American citizen, though he was in fact an American and a Republican. He wrote to ask for a little guidance and advice about the forthcoming presidential election. Who did the minister think would be the best man to vote for? Incredibly – it's still incredible to think back on – the minister promptly wrote back to say, 'I think Mr Cleveland, the Democratic candidate, is the man'. Of course, the delighted Republicans published the letter. The Democrats howled and the minister was given his papers and his marching orders. 

Now the second warning is very recent. It comes to me not as an individual, but simply as a journalist, it comes from the Supreme Court of the United States. The court has just ruled that in a libel suit, the person who claims he's been libelled has the right not only to see the sources that the libeller quoted or used, but he also has a right to ask him what was going through his mind when he put together the alleged libel. Now this came out of a suit against the Columbia Broadcasting System and it's very popular, Sunday evening programme called 'Sixty Minutes'. Each week it takes three topics and devotes 20 minutes to each of them. 

I call these items topics rather than issues because they're only rarely about burning political issues. They are more often than not the results of rather vigorous digging by four CBS correspondents about some... some racket, some injustice that most of us know nothing about. They discover, for instance, that somebody in Florida is doing a roaring business in selling real-estate lots over the phone, lots that turn out not to exist. They expose a chain of phoney private medical clinics in Illinois. They examine some odd religion that's milking its parishioners for millions. 

The topics chosen and the charges of fraud that are either implied, or very explicitly made, in these television reports are bold and vivid. And I, myself, often wonder how the CBS quartet of distinguished reporters manages to get such direct interviews not only with the victims of these various rackets, but also with the people who perpetrate them. I think 'Sixty Minutes' is probably the most thoroughly professional and daring programme of muckraking – in the most honourable sense – now on the American air. And, I hasten to say for people overseas, that 'Sixty Minutes' bears no resemblance to the sort of juicy, hyped up, sex story or gossipy pretence of free speech that defile so many European tabloids. 

What often strikes me about 'Sixty Minutes' is that its reporters must have done a brutally thorough amount of digging to dare to make such downright accusations. Well, recently they did a story about a former army colonel who had reported many atrocities in Vietnam. At this late date, nobody surely doubts that there were many such but the CBS men picked this story because they'd looked into the colonel's particular charges and decided that they wouldn't stand up. The colonel sued for malicious defamation. To support its case, CBS turned over to the courts volumes of reporters' notes, programme drafts, the videotapes of interviews it had used on the programme and interviews it had not used. The colonel wanted to know why this interview was left out and why that one was used. He wanted to know the substance of the usual conferences between the producer of the programme and the correspondent who was in charge of the research and who appeared as the CBS spokesman or reporter on the air. 

Well, CBS said, 'Steady! That would be tantamount to an exhaustive statement about our motives in editing the programme, why we cut this, why we put that in, everything that was going through everybody's mind while the programme was being created.' This may have sounded sarcastic, but to the astonishment of CBS and the dismay of most newspapers in this country, the Supreme Court ruled that the colonel had a right to know these things. In other words and, as a general rule, the court was saying that when a public figure is suing for libel, he/she has a constitutional right in trying to prove the malice that the libel statutes require, has a right to enquire not only into the sources, the documents, and so on, of the alleged libellers, but also their thoughts and procedures while they're putting together their story. 

Well, this ruling follows on two other recent judgement of the court which many people, and I should say a majority of reporters, feel are a blow to freedom of the press. The first involved a reporter from the New York Times whose private digging into the circumstances of a murder case brought the defendant to court. During the trial, the defendant demanded to see the reporter's notebooks and to know the identity of the people he'd talked to. The reporter refused to disclose them on the old ground that a reporter has a privileged right to protect his sources. The Supreme Court said, 'Not so! There is no special right possessed by a reporter over and above his rights as an ordinary citizen.' 

Well, the reporter went to jail and the New York Times paid out several hundred thousands of dollars in fines so long as the man was serving his sentence. 

The other case was one in which the court upheld the right, or rather asserted a right, of the police to raid a newspaper office and search for documents and notes and reports – in a word, the files – to use as evidence in a criminal case. This, too, the humblest reporter will tell you was another shocker and one that makes every reporter think twice about tapping any individual for confidential information. And certainly makes any human being having confidential information think twice about giving it to a reporter. 

This ruling made us think back to the Watergate case and wonder if the president’s men had challenged the right of those two unflagging reporters on the Washington Post whether there would ever have been an exposure of President Nixon's involvement. 

Of course, there are lawyers who say that these new protections for anybody who might be libelled will not harm reporters who can prove that their motives are pure. Frankly, it seems to me that if a reporter had to watch his step and his note-taking every time he went out on a story, every time he interviewed somebody who might or might not be helpful, a great deal of the time his job would be so hedged around with fears and precautions that his notes wouldn't be worth the paper he was writing on. He'd be strongly inclined to say, 'The heck with it! I'll get a job driving a cab in which nobody's going to have a legal right to challenge me in court to say why I took this fare and not that, and what was going through my mind when I ducked down this side street to save time instead of going straight down Piccadilly.' 

Well, I may be growing paranoid but there seems to me ample justification for not talking about even, say, the similarities and differences between an American and a British election campaign lest some court begins to enquire why I mentioned this similarity and left out that. The mere choice of an adjective, two adjectives, as between Mrs Thatcher and Mr Callaghan might in the mind of some ingenious lawyer bring me up to explain why this adjective was chosen and not some blander substitute. 

What a relief it will be next week when it's all over, to know that no words of mine could possibly affect a voter's vote, that no inflection of my voice will be taped and played over in a British court as evidence, as testimony anyway, that led to somebody's losing his or her deposit. I wish you all well. I am scrupulously neutral. My private thoughts about the British election are pasteurised to the point of sterility. I have taken no notes, exchanged no thoughts – swear! – with my buddies, my British friends, my wife. I have retreated in the past week into only the purest thoughts about old-time jazz, golf and a bet I have with a lady friend about who played opposite Madeleine Carroll in 'Secret Agent'. 

In this state of mind, I even hesitate to report on anything at all political that has happened in the United States lest my choice of subject should be suspect. Suppose, suppose I were to tell you that Mr Carter is going to have a rough time in the Senate getting through the almost-completed treaty with the Russians, the so-called SALT agreement, that's an agreement for the limitation of strategic arms. Who does not want to limit the piling up of nuclear arms? All good men and true, and I hasten to say all good women, too, want an end to the arms race. 

The administration – Mr Carter, if you will – says of course we're all agreed on the aim. He says that the treaty that's being worked out will do it. His opponents say that, on the contrary, the treaty binds the United States to certain limits but will give a new lease on nuclear arms production to the Soviet Union. The Republican leader in the Senate says he will oppose the Carter treaty unless there are more foolproof provisions for monitoring or checking on Soviet nuclear tests. 

So, I say unto you, go to the polls in all purity of heart and vote your conscience! I don't need to warn you against voting for your purely personal interests. Nobody in a democracy, surely, would do that!

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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