It’s Not Fake News

In the spring of 1961, John F. Kennedy was the new and largely untested President of the United States. He had been briefed by his military advisors on a plan, left over from the Eisenhower administration, to invade Cuba with an assorted army of Cuban refugees in Florida and some American military personnel.

The landing point in Cuba was the Bay of Pigs. A few days before the planned attack, The New York Times got wind of it and prepared to run a banner headline story. Kennedy, apoplectic, called his friend at the Times, columnist James Reston, and asked that the story be killed. They did not kill the story, although they did, at Reston’s urging, remove any suggestion (there were many) that the attack was imminent. It was no secret that the Cuban refugees were planning for an attack. The secret was its immediacy. And a few days later the attack was launched, to disastrous consequences for the Cuban exile army and President Kennedy and the United States.

To me, the most revealing part of the story is that shortly after the invasion, Kennedy ran into Turner Catledge, the Times’ managing editor, and said: “If you had printed more you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.”

The nuances of this story are endless, although there seems little doubt that Kennedy said what he did to Catledge. The broader point I have always drawn from the incident is not simply that the news media have a constitutionally guaranteed right to disseminate what they know. But that, in doing so, they will often prevent mistakes and stand in the way of stupidity.

The current administration has tended toward a position that they know what’s best, and the job of the news media is to back them up. This is not the role the Founding Fathers envisioned, nor should it be the practice today. Of course, there are times when discretion is needed. In times of war, it would be irresponsible to print planned troop movements. During WWII the United States and the other allied countries practiced press censorship, and all dispatches were read by censors before they could be printed. Some would point out that today we live in an era of endless war, but not one of the conflicts since WWII has involved a threat to the United States’ survival. I would suggest that is a very useful dividing line: Censorship is permissible only in a time of existential war, and otherwise, the media have essentially free rein to report on affairs of state.

In today’s diffuse media environment, censorship of the type practiced during WWII is probably impossible anyway, so it behooves the government to respect and cultivate the media. Of course, we should hope that reporters will be careful and responsible with sensitive material and avoid leaks that might theoretically damage the country. But one person’s leak is another person’s scoop, and anyhow, the U.S. Constitution makes no such distinction. Calling reporters idiots and losers, and their work product fake news, is probably not the best strategy. Especially since, whether the president likes the media or not, it is certainly true that one of the few checks on an out-of-control government is a free, fearless and independent media establishment.

All democracies have some version of a free press. Press freedom is essential to democracy because without it there is no one to hold the government to account and to tell voters what is going on. Different democracies define and allow freedom of the press differently, and the United States has historically been the country that gives the most latitude to the media under the First Amendment to the Constitution. Although leakers of confidential information can be convicted and jailed in the U.S., reporters are never criminally liable for what they print or say on the air. In recent years some overzealous prosecutors have sought to intimidate reporters by demanding their sources and, if they will not reveal them, seeking out judges who will find them in contempt and put them in jail until they do. In many states, this pernicious approach has been thwarted by press shield laws that specifically give reporters the right to keep confidential sources confidential, though there is no such law at the federal level.

Independent media and an absence of media repression laws keep the United States and other democratic countries from falling victim to authoritarian rule. That’s worth remembering for those who want to continue to live in democracies.