Quotes
The principle though remains the same, and the important thing is CBS fought hard, very hard, to protect that principle and will fight again.
The government would be able to go to court with respect to newspaper articles, broadcast pieces and the like that they thought were bad or harmful or even against the government and try to block them.
The government understands - every government, every administration, both parties, understands - that that power they just don't have.
So sometimes the facts are good and sometimes the facts are bad, the important thing from the point of view of a principle as broad and important as freedom of speech is that the courts articulate and set forth in a very protective way what those principles are.
One of my disappointments in looking at this issue is that not enough people are just stepping back and saying, "look, it's important that everybody have the right to speak their mind even if we think the wrong side is winning as a result of it."
No other country in the world gives protection like that, but it is not absolute protection. People sometimes meet that high burden and win libel suits, and in those cases I think they ought to win.
No effective appeal to the federal level. Texas law is, as Mr. Gray says, clear. The opinions in the circuit - in the Fifth Circuit where Texas is - are also clear. Unfortunately, CBS was in a position where there was simply no legal recourse at all in the place where this was going on.
My role in it was not as central as it was in some of the later cases considering I was younger then and I was playing a role of co-counsel on the case.
It's not like learning how to hit a curve ball in baseball.
It's a competing interest that matters.
It just seems to be a human trait to want to protect the speech of people with whom we agree. For the First Amendment, that is not good enough. So it is really important that we protect First Amendment rights of people no matter what side of the line they are on.
It is within the last quarter century or thirty years. And a lot of that law has turned out to be very, very protective of the press and the public's right to know.
It is not to benefit CBS, not to benefit its reporters. On this one, the entire basis of it is this is a way to get more information, more important information to the public. And that's why so many states recognize this.
It has something to do with the facts and the law and who the judges are. So I think lawyers sometimes exaggerate their role in winning and losing. Lawyers do have a role, and a major role, but they're not the only players in this game.
If the word gets out, if the perception exists that by speaking to a CBS journalist you are, therefore, inevitably, immediately speaking to the police, I don't think there's any doubt but that people won't talk. And, therefore, the public won't learn.
I would say that the Pentagon Papers case of 1971 - in which the government tried to block the The New York Times and The Washington Post that they obtained from a secret study of how we got involved in the war in Vietnam - that is probably the most important case.
I was retained to fight very hard in New York against turning over the outtakes. And the prosecution dropped its request for the actual outtakes today in the New York courts. So CBS did everything it could to resist.
I try to do that in this book without preaching - to try to do as you just said that you really have to defend the First Amendment rights of everybody.
I thought that one of the things that we were losing sight of is the basic reasons that we do protect free speech and freedom of the press and the essentiality and centrality in our lives of really giving broad protection to freedom of speech and freedom of the press in America.
I thought I could do that by telling stories of some of the cases that established those principles on a real life on the ground basis.