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The following program is made possible in part by a grant from the Courier Corporation of Lowell Massachusetts. WGBH Radio Boston in cooperation with the Institute for Democratic Communication at Boston University now presents the First Amendment and a Free People, an examination of civil liberties and the media in the 1970s. And now here is the director of the Institute for Democratic Communication Dr. Bernard Rubin. This is Bernard Rubin on this edition of First Amendment and Free People will be discussing the key issues brought to public attention by CBS newsman Daniel Schorr, who decided to release a copy of the so-called Pike papers that he labeled The Report of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, whose chairman is Otis Pike. He released it to the Village Voice, a newspaper in New York. This committee report was completed on January the nineteenth, nineteen hundred and seventy six.
Ten days later the House of Representatives decided not to release the report until censored by the executive branch. Whether this was wise or not, this is the fact of the matter. CBS newsman Dan Schorr had a copy obtained before the decision to keep it secret. Perhaps he was the only on, at least he was in his own mind, to have a copy outside of government. How he got it is again another open question. He has declared his feelings of responsibility to make it available to the public. He felt that this was the job of a newsman. CBS has suspended Shorr from active reporting until this case is decided one way or another, after 23 years with the network. The Village Voice published it on February the 16th,1976. It covers the CIA, the check situation in 1968, the Russian invasion, all of the nuances of how well the CIA and our intelligence gathering operations were conducted. With me today, are two distinguished professors and journalists Carol Rivers of Boston University, whose last article
was in The New York Times Magazine, called The Image of Mental Patients on Television, and she's a former Washington correspondent as well. Also Jim Higgins, editor of the nationally known newspaper The Gazette and Daily of York Pennsylvania, and contributor frequently to the op-ed pages of the Times, the Globe, and Newsday. Having said that much that's too much. Let me just turn to my colleagues and say, "What are your first impressions about the significance of the shore case?" Well that I'll let Carol go ahead. I think Bernie that this is just another skirmish in a war that's going to be continuing. I think the question of what information that the public has a right to know about covert operations is going to be ongoing. And, you know, I think that I guess you would agree Jim that we're going to see more and more of these cases coming up. And I think some of the issue in the Schorr case one of the issues that intrigued me was that a lot of the controversy seemed to
center over the fact that he gave the information not to the network for whom he worked, but to the Village Voice. (Inaudible) saying, "Oh, he sold it," which in fact he didn't. He received a fee for the information, which went to the Reporter's Committee, which is a public interest freedom of the press group. And it seemed to me that I felt, personally, that Schorr's action in doing that was legitimate, that he believed the public had a right to know the information. The networks, which are historically timid about dealing with such information, he had no choice as a reporter who believed the information was necessary to the public to go to another outlet. Was it redundant because it had already been circulated and published on CBS, excerpts from it in the New York Times, and so on? Was it a clear issue? Jim how do you feel about it? Well yeah, I think it was a clear issue because there's a great deal of difference between the text of a document, which it's taken our House committee over a year to
produce. Incidentally it was practically over the dead body of the executive branch of government which placed all kinds of obstructions and obstacles in the way. There's a great deal of difference between that and let's say two and one half or three minutes of TV news, or even a column of news in the New York Times, which did touch on some of the major findings of the of the Pike Committee. What's true, I agree with Carol. Not only that this is going to continue, but that it has been going on for some time. For example you can go back to 1967, when Ramparts Magazine published its, the first really, of the major exposes of CIA corruption, of a student organization, the National Student Organization, and the use of university project endeavors to do this-and-that abroad. You could even go back to 1961, when we found out later about the
CIA involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, or 1954 Guatemala. This is really been a continuing thing since 1947, when the CIA was established, an unprecedented kind of thing for the United States to have. I'm not saying that it's not necessary to have an intelligence agency, but since 1947, this agency has been operating in the foreign policy field without any financial restrictions, without any appropriate or effective oversight or check. All almost a, you know, a freewheeling kind of thing. And what Schorr has done, to get back to that, I hate to personalize this too much, as far as Schorr is concerned, because as a matter of fact Schorr may be out of the picture. It's clear that the House of Representatives is far more interested in who within the House gave the report to Schorr, than they are in tackling the
First Amendment, the Constitutional issues involved, than in Schorr's release of the material to the to The Village Voice. In fact, the author of the resolution, Congressman Stratton, I heard on a TV program, I think on channel 2, not long ago that Martin (Agronsky?) program, Stratton took the position that they were not investigating the Village Voice. They were not going to get involved in a First Amendment issue. They were simply, you know what, after going through a year, more than a year, of studying the CIA and the other intelligence agencies, and suppressing the report, because it was never submitted, by the way, to the executive for censorship, never submitted, after going through that, they've now appropriated $350,000 to find, to do another investigation on how the report got out, you see, to the people. That's it. There's a House Ethics Committee which will look into the question of who is involved in this case, even if they weren't government employees, not connected with the government at all.
Sure. Yeah, whoever got the report to Schorr or to whatever other people, I would assume that the New York Times must have seen the report in order to be able to write about it. But it's ridiculous you know because the Congress is supposed to represent the people of the United States. They were elected to do that. They were authorized to conduct under, I think its Section 9 Article 1 of the Constitution, that section which deals with the powers and functions of the Congress, and then they decide that "No" it's not to be kept to the, it's not to be released to the people of the United States. Until such time you might say as the CIA itself, which is a member of the executive branch, or an instrument of the (inaudible) decides what should be in it and what shouldn't be in it. You know it's ridiculous. Carol, you agree with Jim, that Schorr actually brought an issue to the American public, that his own position is less important than this whole issue of freedom of the press, the freedom of exchange of information. Yes I think so and I think there is a legitimate question about this type of information
dealing with intelligence operations. But this is not a piece of information that was somehow just pulled out of the blue. This is an agency which is under fire which has been charged with corruption and which the American people, at this point, need to know what its track record has been. So I don't think this is just a question of somebody who wants to wreck the American intelligence or some radical group that wants to wreck Americans' intelligence operation. But a question of how can decisions be made about what the proper role for intelligence should be. Unless the public has some understanding of what kind of things have been going on, such as the, as Jim referred to, the kind of covert activity which is not simply gathering intelligence but is simply interfering directly in the foreign affairs of another country, sometimes without the knowledge of the Congress, which to me is one of the most shocking things that has come out of this whole
intelligence CIA scandal. One of the things that I find interesting is that Schorr is not exactly a teddy bear that you want to cuddle. I mean he's an aggressive reporter, he was the one that the Nixon administration had followed, but people observing this case on the left and on the right. For example on the right is William Saffire, writes in the op ed page of The New York Times, he sees that Schorr is being mishandled. He's been attacking Kissinger lately about the Sheehan article in Foreign Affairs, where some of Sheehan's talk with Sadat and the Israelis, Rabin and so on and so forth, has now been released in rather large chunks of... You see you see Bernie that's the whole question. Leaks are perfectly proper if they come from Kissinger, or they come from the National Security Council, if they come from the executive branch. I mean leaks are just a common practice in the businesses. Carol and you well know, we all know that. It's just a question of where they come from and what the content of the material is. And to go back again to what Carol
said, I think it's exceptionally important not only that the Congress but that the people as a whole know at least what kind of activities the CIA has been engaged in. And even more important, more substantial in my opinion, what type of foreign policy is represented by the activities of the of the CIA? If it's a foreign policy to which the United States people would generally agree, why all the necessity for secrecy? And listen, as far as secrecy is concerned, it's only the people of the United States that are being kept in the dark. You know I mean every country abroad, within which the CIA is operating, knows, I would think very well, what the CIA is doing, has been doing, plans to do. But what do we know? We know that they say they're spending what two to three billion dollars a year. The Pike Committee finds out that they're spending at least 10 billion dollars a year. We also find
out that they've been corrupt. You talk about Lockheed and Gulf bribing businessmen or right wing politicians abroad. The CIA has been in the business of this since 1947, interfering in foreign elections, giving money to right wing parties and politicians, and also very important of course from our point of view, corrupting newspapers and radio stations and TV stations abroad, planting news, having it disseminated back to the United States, so that you know a person here taking a look at the at the press or listening the radio and TV has a very difficult time figuring out what's right and what isn't right. Well in the release of the Pike Committee, I want to throw this to Carol, in the Village Voice, page 88, this is an authoritative source, if it is, an under seen manipulation of the media. The text is from the Pike Committee report: The free flow of information vital to responsible and credible press has been
threatened as a result of the CIA's use of the world media for cover and for clandestine information gathering. There are disturbing indications that the accuracy of many news stories has been undermined as well. Information supplied to the Committee suggests that some was planted, falsified articles have reached readers in the US. Carol, what do you make of all of this, this problem that we're having with the intelligence branch versus the needs of the press? Well it's interesting, because Colby's view, of course, for a while the CIA as is now known, used regular employees of American information services abroad, of newspapers and networks abroad. Colby now says - he's the former head of the of the CIA- I heard him recently talking about this policy, and he says now the official CIA policy is "No more, hands off the full timers, the regular staffers." But they regard stringers and freelancers as people who market a service. They sell information and they feel it is perfectly legitimate for them to say
when they sell a story to NBC and when another day sell a story to the CIA. This is the question of how much of those particular freelancers stringers also get information fed the other way, back from the CIA, that they can then feed to the American media. You wouldn't want to apply this to a doctor in a hospital, say "Are you a regular member of the staff. If so, I have certain regulation, if you're just visiting, Doc, you can do anything you want to." Well I think that the definition of a journalist, at least my definition of a journalist, is that a journalist is not simply somebody in the market selling information, but has some kind of a commitment to truth, in so far as he or she can find it. And that would seem to me that anybody who is involved with an intelligence agency and a press organization involved, on the face of it, in a conflict of interest. How many of you remember, and where we're so wise here, do you remember Henry Hall in a million movies of the 1930s and '40s as the editor of that country newspaper in the
West they're always burning down? He was the one who said "You shall not destroy the press." Is the press now in that kind of Henry Hall attitude that we're going to protect the First Amendment where we're more concerned with our profession than we are getting certain stories that might be easier if we if we played ball with government? Well yeah, bring that up. The press really, up until Watergate you know, I don't think I had the best track record in the world. I'm talking in the post World War II period, as far as being the kind of press, the kind of media, that Carol says should be represented by journalists seeking the truth. No, the newspapers, radio, and television, they generally did play ball with government all during this period. They agreed with government, they withheld stories, or refer again to the Bay of Pigs, a story of '61.
They had the information but they withheld it at government request. And in general you know all through the 60s they supported the War in Vietnam with some honorable exceptions, but they did support it. But you see this business, about releasing material, compiled by a committee of the Congress, to the people of the United States, has a background, you know, and it doesn't only extend back to post-World War II. But it also has to do with the whole business of let's say the Pentagon Papers, the mood developed by the release of the Pentagon Papers and by the Watergate scandals. Is that is that mood abated now? Carol, for example, taking what Jim said, that there was a new mood, I notice that there is some data that shows that television news is more innocuous than it was before the Pentagon Papers. They've retreated back, certainly many of the newspapers act as if they're frightened to death, are not Turkey Hawks, they're chickens when it comes to major stories. Look at what CBS did to Schorr.
Yes, I think what happened too is that there was tremendous pressure put on the networks by the affiliates around the country. I remember going to a, right at the height of Watergate, to a New York State Broadcasters Association. And some of the CBS people were there, and now these were all broadcasters, they were tremendously hostile to the CBS News executives who were there. They were angry and this - Watergate had broken. They were angry at the handling of the story. They felt that CBS was out to get the president, and they, it was very clear, that the pressure on the networks, coming from a lot of the affiliates, was against this kind of (inaudible) when they were made uncomfortable and unhappy by this aggressive reporting. They really much prefer the kind of reporting that went on, you said, "The president said this and somebody else said this," and made no effort to investigate. No effort to press ahead. Well it is alleged by, we've mentioned William Sapphire, and one of his articles in the op-ed page that one of the reasons he alleges that the show was suspended from active duty was that he mentioned on the Cronkite program something about the leadership of
CBS and the use of by the CIA, a possible use of newsman working for CBS. CBS denied it, but that the hierarchy including William Paley, was so annoyed by this, that they again, as he alleges, as Saffire alleges, that they said we had enough of Schorr. Well, one correspondent that I know left a major network because he had the story, remember when Pat Gray of the FBI had burned some of the documents. This was an absolutely illegal kind of act, an improper act, for the head of the FBI to do, covering up. I think he took them home and burned them in his fireplace. Yes I recall, and never made any bones about it, just that I burned them. And their correspondents had this, and the network would not use it, sat on it for four days, until it was in the Post or the Times, I forget, came out with the story and he quit in indignation. But it's well-known in Washington, and it's not only the networks, it's a lot of
papers, whose newsmen had stories that are very controversial, and their editors, you know, they quaver and they don't want to use them. So they leak the story to The Times, or they leak it to The Washington Post, so it can then appear there, and then their editors say well The Times had it or the wires had it, so we can use it. So the image of all these crusading editors out there trying to scoop people is false. They're very cautious and they tend not to go with things. Even on the Gray story that still hesitant when it comes to a story that somebody says hold this story because it involves national security. By the way, the Gray story, this is just off the subject, reminds me of the old Two-Step flow in communications. He didn't burn it right away. First he hid it in his closet. That's right. Step two was burning. But, so where are we now? If we look ahead, let's say that we're looking ahead into the next year, and what will Schorr tell us, those lessons with Schorr case? Yeah well I suspect that there's going to be less of this
kind of, I hope I maybe I'm wrong, there's less of a tendency now to automatically play ball with the term national security when this will hurt the country. When I was in Washington during the Vietnam era, we had something called deep background briefings, which were absurd. We would go to a briefing, remember that, the year when he was out there, we would go to a briefing with McGeorge Bundy, say, and here we were watching him get out of Washington you know Chevy Chase was the furthest we've gotten away from the city and we go in and McGeorge Bundy would come in and he would say we are winning the war, this is happening, this is happening, and the rules of this briefing were that we could use the information but we could not identify either Bundy or that this came from the U.S. government. So everybody would go out and the next day would write these stories that seemed to come from nowhere, saying the U.S. is winning the war in Vietnam, and it would appear to the reader as if this was independent information verified by the news media. In fact it was simply being spoon fed. That's corruption, Carol, yes corruption at the source of the news.
Yeah, and there was really nothing you could do about it. As I say I used to participate in those, but I would agree with you on, or perhaps it was Bernie, or I guess was you Carol, that said that in the future, I think we're going to be a little bit more suspicious, I hope so, of the indiscriminate use of the excuse of national security or executive privilege or you might say in the case of Kissinger a secretaryship's privilege. You know, of not providing information to the Congress of the United States and through the Congress to the people of the United States. I mean number one speaking of Washington I had a conversation with the late Drew Pearson, the predecessor of the column now conducted by Jack Anderson, Pearson I know quite well, and I asked I said "Listen Drew what's national security? Please tell me." He says "national security is anything any president defines it to be for his in his own interests or his own from his own outlook." I mean as you see this is one of the things that Schorr is contributing to it seems to me or the release of the of the Pike
investigation is contributing to. We're going to take a look at how do you define national security, what is the national interest, what should a foreign policy be and how should it be conducted in the best interests or let's say in the general welfare of the people of the United States? That's the kind of thing apparently our executives are scared to death of. Well the test I guess is whether the press, so-called fourth estate, is independent or whether it's connected by umbilical cord to government. If that is true, that it sustains a lot of its life by feeding on government, which I think is largely true since 1945 we may not like it, then we don't have an independent press. Now is the is the press corporate more meaningfully than it is independent? Is it searching less importantly than it is just reporting, filling up pages, and selling those pages, or is it trying to get to the protection of the First Amendment?
Carol? I think the press is corporate. There's no question about that. Interesting question that arises in my mind much as, and I certainly admire the Washington Post's leadership role in Watergate, what would have happened if this had happened say under a President whose name was Kennedy who had very close personal ties with the leadership of the Washington Post? Would the same effort have been made with the same thing have happened? And I suspect the answer is no. Didn't Kennedy meet with reporters at their houses or someplace and he would give them a story. The next day they would look very, very learned about a certain subject. The managing editor of The Washington Post Ben Bradlee has written a book about Kennedy, very close pals. And sure, all presidents do this, they they invite people around they have lunch with them or they, you know, have a bar. And they should, ah yeah. I don't see anything wrong with that. I think what we need to solve this, we need a president, a great president like Calvin Coolidge. You remember because he couldn't get into trouble. Right after lunch he went to take his nap until about 5 o'clock. You know the famous guy who said that when people are out of work
unemployment results that was one of the great definitions of our time I think coming from presidential sources. But you know, Will Rogers he said this is the only country in the world where people go to the poorhouse in an automobile. This irrelevant to our subject. Well you know I sort of object, Bernie, to just speaking of the press as if it were an entity or an organism. You know there are newspapers, there are radio stations, there are networks. You can just take the printed media, the newspapers, you know there are an awful lot of good editors, an awful lot of conscientious editors and reporters. And I don't know, I just feel that what's happening as illustrated by the release of the investigations of the Pike committee, I think that what's going to keep happening is, and I hope it will come from younger and younger people entering the industry,
is as more conscientious thorough investigative reporting in the spirit of the First Amendment. You know that's really what we're dealing with here. When you say that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press the intent of that of course is that the people shall have information you know on which they can make up their minds about how they should live. This is whether we are training reporters correctly or people who go into journalism are trained to know about government, politics, science, business, industry, technology, or whether they're just media happy. I have a hunch that for many years we were dealing with a lot of media happy people. I think we still are. Is that a major problem in your view? Carol's been teaching. What is, what do you think about this? Well sure there are media happy people. I think what we're now in education in journalism certainly we're getting the fallout from Watergate where everybody wants to be you know Woodward and Bernstein. But I think one thing we're not doing is, and I think we should do more is, teaching students that the relationship, the
corporate relationship, between how the press relates to the major institutions and what I part they should play in either changing or sustaining that role. I think I think they should be told about that, and they should know that not all decisions are made by editors who are thinking about the First Amendment. They may be made by publishers who are thinking about who they have lunch with or who their business cronies are. This kind of thing plays a terribly large role in it, and they should know about it and shouldn't be misled. Jim, what would Jefferson say if he looked at the Pike Committee? Oh I don't know, you know, what he said was that if he had a choice to make between government without newspapers and newspapers without a government they choose the latter. But you know he added a sentence that is very rarely added in the general quotes of that citation, which is that the condition would be that the people would be equipped, be literate enough to read these papers and to understand what was in them. You know very important qualification. But I think what you have to teach your
students, how much time do we have? We have about one minute. You know what you have to teach students, really I agree with Carol, is the is the corporate nature of the business. And then you have to teach them not to lose whatever idealism or vision that they have. You have to teach them the real meaning of the First Amendment and you have to indicate to them that there are two ways really of getting in a position to tell the truth. One is to become a star. Then OK you are accorded a certain privilege. The other is to organize yourselves, to organize yourselves and to present the management with an organized strength in terms of truth and accurate reporting. Carol does that summarize your view or do you want to add something? I just want to add that we also must remember that the press is a very seriously flawed and it is not this this fine working mechanism. That it needs great improvement, as does government. The press is hardly perfect. Well that may be true and I certainly agree with Carol, but let me say that it's not
flawed because of Jim Higgins and Carol Rivers who are adding lustre to the press role. I don't think it's an attack from the program. I don't think so, because the discussion I think proved it. This is Bernard Rubin thanking everybody for coming to this edition of First Amendment and Free People. WGBH Radio Boston in cooperation with the Institute for Democratic Communication at Boston University has presented the First Amendment and the Free People, an examination of the media and civil liberties in the 1970s. This program was recorded in the studios of WGBH Boston and was made possible in part by a grant from the courier corporation of Lowell Massachusetts.
Series
The First Amendment
Episode
James Higgins
Producing Organization
WGBH Educational Foundation
Contributing Organization
WGBH (Boston, Massachusetts)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/15-22h7119z
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Description
Series Description
"The First Amendment is a weekly talk show hosted by Dr. Bernard Rubin, the director of the Institute for Democratic Communication at Boston University. Each episode features a conversation that examines civil liberties in the media in the 1970s. "
Created Date
1976-03-09
Genres
Talk Show
Topics
Social Issues
Media type
Sound
Duration
00:29:28
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Credits
Producing Organization: WGBH Educational Foundation
Production Unit: Radio
AAPB Contributor Holdings
WGBH
Identifier: 76-0165-04-10-001 (WGBH Item ID)
Format: 1/4 inch audio tape
Generation: Master
Duration: 00:29:15
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Citations
Chicago: “The First Amendment; James Higgins,” 1976-03-09, WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed March 29, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-22h7119z.
MLA: “The First Amendment; James Higgins.” 1976-03-09. WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. March 29, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-22h7119z>.
APA: The First Amendment; James Higgins. Boston, MA: WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-22h7119z