The Press: Roadblocks on Fleet Street

It seemed like an enterprising piece of reporting: that the Irish Republican Army might have learned how to detonate terrorist bombs in Northern Ireland by remote radio signal. The story added, helpfully enough, that if British army technicians could learn what radio frequencies the I.R.A. used, the bombs could be detonated prematurely.

The article appeared last May in London’s Time Out, a trendy counterculture weekly, and the British government was apparently not amused. Last month Scotland Yard arrested two Time Out reporters, Crispin Aubrey, 31, and Duncan Campbell, 24, as well as a former British army signal corpsman, John Berry, 33, for violating the 66-year-old Official Secrets Act. The arrests might have drawn only the usual left-wing cries of protest if the government had not two weeks earlier completed deportation hearings against another journalist, American-born Mark Hosenball, 25, a former Time Out reporter now on the staff of London’s respected Evening Standard, and Philip Agee, 42, a former Central Intelligence Agency operative and one of Hosenball’s sources for Time Out stories on her majesty’s secret spooks (TIME, Nov. 29). Under British law, the government need not say precisely why Aubrey, Campbell, Berry, Hosenball and Agee are being punished, and the press is effectively prohibited from trying to find out. Says Ron Knowles, an official of Britain’s National Union of Journalists: “Journalism is becoming a high-risk occupation in this country.”

No Windsorgate. That is nothing new. Though Fleet Street’s influential national dailies are freighted with sex, scandal and scholarly dissertations on foreign policy, hard-digging investigative reporting is all but impossible. “Our law and our attitudes have been conditioned to defend free speech rather than free inquiry,” observes Editor Harold Evans, whose exceptionally aggressive Sunday Times has repeatedly incurred government wrath in the past decade. “It is all right to utter opinion but not to publish the supporting evidence.” Thus probably no British newspaper would have got away with a disclosure similar to the Washington Post’s report last month of secret CIA payoffs to Jordan’s King Hussein (see Newswatch). Nor is it likely that a British version of the Pentagon papers or the Watergate scandals would ever have seen the light of print.

One problem is that Britain has no equivalent of First Amendment guarantees of press freedom. Instead, British journalists face a daunting obstacle course of legal restrictions: 1) strict libel laws that allow even notorious public figures to win damages for disclosures that in the U.S. would not be considered actionable; 2) stringent contempt-of-court rules under which a journalist can be jailed for any original reporting about a matter that is sub judice, that is, before a court; 3) the principle of “confidence,” which protects from disclosure industrial secrets and other private information that would be considered fair game in the U.S.; and 4) the so-called D (for defense) notices, which are issued by the government as advance warnings that stories about certain subjects would be harmful to national defense. Though the notices are not legally binding, editors almost always take them seriously, and they amount to a kind of prior restraint that in the U.S. would probably be ruled unconstitutional.

Avoid Probate. Of all the roadblocks on Fleet Street, the most formidable is the Official Secrets Act, which makes illegal the unauthorized dissemination of any government document, no matter how trivial. Indeed the act was used in 1932 to jail a journalist for two months for publishing details of a will leaked to him by a probate clerk. Since the measure was adopted in 1911, in the heat of an anti-German spy scare, at least seven journalists have been prosecuted and four imprisoned. In 1974 the Labor Party campaigned on a pledge to narrow the most sweeping sections of the act, and the promise was repeated last autumn in the House of Commons by Home Secretary Merlyn Rees.

It is Rees, however, who ordered the deportation of Hosenball and Agee and who, as nominal head of Scotland Yard, is responsible for the arrest of Aubrey, Campbell and Berry. It may be just a coincidence that Rees was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland last spring when the potentially explosive Time Out article about radio bombs was published, and that a number of alleged I.R.A. terrorists have indeed been killed when devices they were carrying exploded prematurely.

A number of British journalists, jurists and Members of Parliament are displeased with the state of press freedom in Britain and with their government’s recent round of journalist bashing. “This is extremely worrying,” says M.P. Robin Corbett, a member of the Labor Party’s civil liberties group. “It stinks.” Corbett knows: he and some colleagues tried to debate the subject in Parliament last month, but the speaker of the House of Commons ruled that because Agee was appealing his deportation, the matter was sub judice and could not be discussed.