Military Censorship In The Usa Pros And Cons

The Issue That Threatens U.S. National Security

National security and the First Amendment had clashed many times throughout the years. And part of the First Amendment is the freedom of speech and freedom of press. The press (more specifically print journalism such as newspapers, magazines, news media, etc.) has its own advantages and disadvantages for the United States. Several advantages can be measured how it is utilized. For example, a civilian can go to a coffee shop, buy a cup of coffee, and sit down with a newspaper or a magazine, and start reading recent news. Journalism is keeping civilians informed on what is going on at home or the entire world. The presidency and its occupants uses the advantages of electronic and print media as

One of them was a level of trust between soldier-sensor and the reporter (Snow, 2014). Here, the reporter have to believe that the information is censored due to security concerns, and that the military is not hiding evidence of military ineptitude; while the censor have to believe the reporter is “not naively compromising legitimate secrets” (Snow, 2014). It had worked adequately, until the Vietnam conflict. This brings its first drawback to military censorship. Tensions grew between reporters and the government during the Vietnam War, especially when the Tet took offensive at the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in January 1968. The reporters “concluded they had been lied to in reports of progress in the war”, that they had been “reporting those lies”, and that they had been “deceiving their readers and viewers” (Drew & Snow, 2006). Throughout the years, such tension had remained in the journalism-government relationship ever

The majority of leak cases, “the leaker is a whistleblower disclosing potential government wrong doing” (Freivogel, 2009). According to Derigan Silver’s article, National Security and the Press, “the Department of Justice is committed to investigating and prosecuting leaks of classified information, and Congress has given the department the statutory tools to do so”, which includes statutes prohibiting “unauthorized disclosure of certain categories of classified information”, disclosure of information relation to national defense, and information relating to communications intelligence activities (Silver, 2008).

To prevent unauthorized information making on the newspaper, the government and the journalists must, a cooperative and responsible relationship. That the press must “routinely ask the government for guidance on the ramifications of the national security information in their possession and frequently have withheld stories or limited their scope in order to soften their impact” (Papandrea, 2011). For example, when President Kennedy requested the New York Times to delay publishing the story about Cuba’s nuclear weapons (Papandrea,