The nationwide flap over the special report has
caused a deluge of negative e-mails, delivery of least one packet of suspicious
powder and — in what many gleefully noted — led the newspaper to position armed
security guards at its headquarters building.
Of course, The Journal News, in Rockland County,
N.Y., had a First Amendment right to post publicly the detailed public records.
Likewise, readers and others around the nation have a right to criticize the
decision, in the most severe terms.
But the ranks of critics include some state
legislators — and likely will include more — who would craft all manner of
official reactions to the Dec. 23 interactive map containing permit holders’
locations and personal information for Rockland and Westchester counties.
Not content with merely taking such records out of
public circulation, as some states did some years ago, a Maryland lawmaker
wants a law telling journalists what they can and cannot print, post or
broadcast. Maryland State Delegate Pat McDonough said last week he would
introduce legislation to “prohibit newspapers and other publications from
printing personal or private information about firearm owners.”
Criticizing unpopular news media while also
proposing legislation that attracts wide popular support will be impossible to
resist for opportunistic as well as concerned lawmakers. And certainly it’s
within the duties of legislators to look out for the safety of constituents, if
that’s what is at stake here.
Are public records “private”? No, but in the
pre-Internet era, much information that was “public” existed in practical
obscurity. It was all in county courthouse records, but not all that
accessible. Until recently, no one could have created an interactive map with
detailed personal information as easily as did the New York newspaper.
By using aggregate statistics, news outlets such as
the Memphis Commercial Appeal have used public records to report that permits
were being issued to felons, the mentally incompetent and others who were not
supposed to get them.
Other journalists have tracked how quickly guns
purchased legally in one area have been used in crimes in another. Such
information also can be used to refute or support claims of any link between
high-crime areas and the presence of firearms, or the deterrence value of a
concentration of homes with self-defense weapons.
Government officials should be doing an effective,
responsible job of issuing permits and evaluating such data. But a free press
also must be there on behalf of us all, with access to the same information, to
hold officials accountable for their decisions. The public — you and I — can in
turn hold the news operation accountable for what it reports.
Such is the underpinning of decades of hard-fought
victories to open or keep open a range of records about public business
compiled with public funds by public officials who might otherwise keep them
behind closed file drawers or computer firewall.
The gun flap is not really a new situation, even
with the Web-era twist. For many, many years, car-accident photos were the
staple of many a newspaper front or inside page. The color era ramped up the
impact of such photos. Readers across the nation let their local editors know
that’s not what they wanted to see on a daily basis, and such photos generally
disappeared — but news reports about significant traffic issues and accidents continue
to this day, sans the gore.
No questions or legislation arose about the First
Amendment right to publish the pictures. Journalists decided on the right
things to print for their readers, weighing what readers needed to know and
what readers wanted to know.
Presumably, that’s a process under way in Rockland
County, N.Y. And that’s the right approach under the First Amendment.
About the author: Gene Policinski, senior vice
president and executive director of the First Amendment Center, is a veteran journalist
whose career has included work in newspapers, radio, television and online.
This article was published by the First Amendment
Center.
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