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About Portland observer. (Portland, Or.) 1970-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 23, 1978)
Page 12 Portland Observer Section II Thursday, February 23, 1978 The Block Press and the First Amendment by James I). Williams When the first Congress pro posed the first ten amendments - The Bill of Rights - to the Constitution in 1791, it was act ing in response to the public's fears that the Constitution itself set no limits on what the govern ment could do in its relationships with its citizens. Having just emerged from a revolution whose purpose was to create a free nation, the protection of individual rights against govern ment intrusion was of critical importance to the founding fath ers. and not the least of these rights was freedom of the press. In writing into the First Amendment the stricture that “Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech or the press," there was both a recognition of the vital role the press had played in influencing public opinion in America to throw off the yoke of English rule -- a role which was regarded as patriotic and not treasonous - and an effort to insure that the freedom, which had helped spawn the revolution, would be preserved. The Amendment echoed Thomas Jefferson's asser tion that "our country depends on the freedom of the press and that cannot be limited without being lost.” Freedom of the press as em bodied in the First Amendment, however, has always been limit ed. As a practical matter, only those who owned the press were free to exercise that freedom; those who were non-owners could not. Just as the govern inent was constitutionally prohi bited from telling a press owner what could or could not be printed, so was a non-press own er powerless to determine what the press should or should not say. That privilege was reserved for the owners, not the consum ers. What the government was guaranteeing was simply the ba sic right of the press to operate free of governmental restric tions, not how well or how fairly it should serve the public. This basic concept has been continual ly reaffirmed throughout the 200 years of the nation; most recent ly in the decision of the Supreme Court in the case of the New York Times vs. United States. Here the government sought to prevent the Times from printing portions of the so-called Penta gon Papers. The Court ruled against the government. In re jecting the plaintiffs conten tions. Justices Hugo Black and William 0 . Douglas wrote: “In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government." And so the press has remained free in this phase of its operation since the beginning of the nation. But at the same time, as the press has grown in size and pervasiveness and expanded to include radio, television, and other methods of communica tions which certainly could not have been foreseen by the fram ers of the First Amendment - it has moved further and further away from the people, increasing the difficulty of public access. In the early days of the Republic, when any free man. assuming that he was literate and so inclined, could set up his own small press with what for that time was a reasonably modest investment, newspapers proli ferated and there was the oppor tunity for many views to be heard. Later, with the develop ment of the mass communica tions industry as big business, the enormous cost of operation materially reduced the number of press outlets to the point where today, many of our cities are one newspaper towns. Many of the television and radio sta tions are owned by the same people who own the newspapers, and the accepted hallmark of success - television news - from whence most people get their information - is not necessarily based on content, but on the number of viewers a news pro SAMUEL CORNISH James D Williams, Director of Communications of the National Urban League, is a prize winning jour nalist with more than a decade of experience in the black press. His intimate knowledge of its history comes as a result of serving successively as editor of The Carolinian, the Baltimore Afro-American and the Washington Afro-American A former Public Affairs Director of the Office of Equal Opportunity, and Direc tor of Information for the U S. Commission on Civil Rights. Mr. Williams currently is an adjunct professor of journalism at Hunter College. U not m . 4451 SE 28th American State Bank 2737 NE Union
