Keep Out

Another rebuff for newsmen

Any Baedeker of the nation's most wretched hoosegows would have to include Little Greystone, part of the Alameda County jail complex in Pleasanton, Calif. Once a model prison, that Kafkaesque wooden barracks has in the past decade or so become a cesspool of rapes, beatings and illnesses. A U.S. district court in 1972 declared conditions there a violation of the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

After a 1975 suicide at Little Greystone, the innovative San Francisco public television station KQED sent a reporter and a cameraman to film conditions there. County Sheriff Thomas Houchins turned them away. But after the station sued to gain entry, Houchins announced a program of regular monthly prison tours open to the public, including reporters. There were a few catches: no cameras, no tape recorders, no interviews with inmates and no access at all to the Little Greystone building. The station pressed its suit, and a federal district court ordered the sheriff to grant the press wider access.

Last week, however, in a decision that might have brought louder cries of protest from journalists had they not been so busy covering the Bakke ruling, the Supreme Court said that the press has no more First Amendment rights to enter a public facility than does any private citizen. "The right to receive ideas and information is not the issue," wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger. "The issue is a claimed special privilege of access which," the court went on, "is not essential to guarantee the freedom to communicate or publish."

The refusal to give the press unique access comes only four weeks after the court, in Zurcher vs. Stanford Daily, refused to grant journalists any special First Amendment protection from legal police searches. A few weeks before that, Burger declared in an opinion in another case that members of the press generally have no greater free speech rights than nonmembers. All this has convinced some journalists that the court is growing increasingly indifferent to the rights of the press. Says Jack Landau, director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press: "The court feels the press is arrogant and greedy and powerful enough to get what it wants without help from the court. But most of the press is not the big, rich, influential media that the Justices see in Washington, and all those local reporters do need support from the court to do their job."

Well, what of the argument that the press enjoys no special privileges under the First Amendment? Says Professor Paul Bender of the University of Pennsylvania law school: "The pattern is not one of depriving the press of its rights, but of not giving the press extra things.

The court is saying that once you have information you can publish it, but the government isn't obliged to let you have it."

In the KQED case, however, the court was sharply divided. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a vigorous dissent, joined by Justices William Brennan and Lewis Powell, insisting that courts can give the press greater access to government information than the public if the press alone requests it. The three felt that Sheriff Houchins did not provide sufficient access for either the press or the public. Justice Potter Stewart voted against KQED because he found the lower court's injunction too broad, but wrote a separate opinion that contained one shaft of sunlight for journalists: to have the same effective access to a public facility as the general public, he asserted, reporters should be allowed to bring along their cameras and other tools of the trade. The lawyer for KQED, figuring that Stewart would have sided with them had they won a narrower ruling from the district court, says they will try again to breach the walls of Little Greystone. Says KQED News Director George Osterkamp: "The court seems to be refusing to agree that the press represents the public." -

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.