by Howard Zinn
from FBI files, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, indicated that in the late
1960s and early 1970s, when the FBI was trying to break up the Black Panther
organization, nineteen Black Panthers across the nation were kil ed by law-enforcement
officials or by one another in internal feuds (some of which were provoked by the FBI).57
One of those deaths was of Fred Hampton, the Chicago Black Panther leader. It turned out
that his personal bodyguard, Wil iam O'Neal, was an FBI infiltrator, who gave his FBI
contact, Roy Mitchel , a detailed floor plan of the apartment occupied by Fred Hampton and
others. In a predawn raid, Chicago police fired hundreds of bul ets into the apartment, and
Hampton, asleep in his bed, was kil ed. There was an FBI memorandum from the Chicago
field office on December 8, 1969 (a few days after the raid):
167
Prior to the raid, a detailed inventory of the weapons and also a detailed floor
plan of the apartment were furnished to local authorities… . The raid was
based on the information furnished by the informant.58
Although the COINTELPRO was declared suspended in 1971, the FBI continued to keep tabs
on organizations that were carrying on nonviolent political activities, but in opposition to
official government policy. In 1988 it was revealed (in documents given to the Center for
Constitutional Rights under the Freedom of Information Act) that the FBI had infiltrated and
kept records on hundreds of organizations in the United States that were opposed to
President Reagan's policies in Central America. There were 3,500 pages of files. The excuse
was that the FBI was concerned about terrorism. But the records showed a concern for what
these organizations were saying, in speech and in writing. A dispatch from the FBI field
office in New Orleans in 1983 said:
It is imperative at this time to formulate some plan of action against CISPES
[Committee in Support of the People of El Salvador] and specifical y against
individuals who defiantly display their contempt for the U.S. government by
making speeches and propagandizing their cause.59
What happens to members of the secret police who engage in il egal acts? Hardly anything.
If there is a particularly flagrant set of actions that are exposed to the public, there may be
a token prosecution of one or two minor figures. But they certainly wil not be sent to
prison, as would ordinary people who intercepted mail or broke into people's homes.
We have as evidence the case of Mark Felt and Edward Mil er, two FBI agents, who were the
only FBI men prosecuted despite the evidence of thousands of il egal acts brought out by
the Senate committee investigating the FBI. Felt and Mil er were convicted of authorizing
nine il egal break-ins at homes of friends and relatives of members of the Weather
Underground (a radical offshoot of the sixties student movement).
There was no evidence that any of these friends and relatives had broken the law, but FBI
agents broke in, photographed personal papers, including diaries, statements of political
philosophy, and love letters. None of this turned up evidence that helped them find
members of the Underground. Felt and Mil er could have received maximum prison
sentences of ten years. They were not sent to prison, but were fined $5,000 and $3,500,
respectively.60
The most striking evidence that the FBI was not acting against terrorism or for national
security, but was in fact interfering with the First Amendment rights, was its harassment of
Martin Luther King, Jr.
In 1961-1962 there were mass demonstrations by black people in Albany, Georgia, against
racial segregation there. The Southern Regional Council, an Atlanta research group, sent me
(I was teaching at Spelman Col ege in Atlanta at that time) to Albany to report on the
situation there. My report was critical of the federal government in general and the FBI in
particular. It said, "With al the clear violations by local police of constitutional rights, with undisputed evidence of beatings by sheriffs and deputy sheriffs, the FBI has not made a
single arrest on behalf of Negro citizens."61
The 1976 Senate committee report on the FBI referred to my report on the Albany
situation:
Before even receiving the ful report, Bureau officials were describing it as
"slanted and biased" and were searching their files for information about the
report's author.
168
Shortly after the Report was issued, newspapers quoted Dr. King saying that
he agreed with the Report's conclusions that the FBI had not vigorously
investigated civil rights violations in Albany. FBI headquarters was
immediately notified of Dr. King's remarks.
It was not long after this that the FBI began its serious surveil ance of King. According to
the Senate report: "From December, 1963 until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr.
was the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to
'neutralize' him as an effective civil rights leader."62 Wil iam Sul ivan, the FBI man in charge of this operation, told the committee, "No holds were barred. We have used similar
techniques against Soviet agents… . We did not differentiate. This is a rough, tough
business."
Of course, King was not a Soviet agent but an American citizen exercising his constitutional
right to speak, write, and organize. The FBI tried its best to stop him from doing this
effectively. It tried to discredit him in various ways, tried to get universities to withhold
honorary degrees from him, to prevent the publication of articles favorable to him, to find
"friendly" journalists to print unfavorable articles. It put microphones in his hotel rooms and offered to play the recordings to reporters. In May of 1962 the FBI included King on its
"Reserve Index" as a person to be rounded up and detained in event of a national
emergency.63
It should be noted that al this cannot be attributed simply to the racial bias of FBI Director
J. Edgar Hoover. The Kennedy administration and the Johnson administration col aborated
with the FBI. David Garrow, biographer of King, referred to Attorney General Robert
Kennedy's "unquestioning acceptance of the Bureau's reports on King." And Burke Marshal , head of the Civil Rights division of the Department of Justice, defended Robert Kennedy's
action in authorizing the FBI to eavesdrop on King's conversations.64
What al of this indicates is that, despite the Constitution, despite the First Amendment and
its guarantees of free speech, American citizens must fear to speak their minds, knowing
that their speech, their writings, their attendance of meetings, their signing of petitions, and
their support of even the most nonviolent of organizations may result in their being listed in
the files of the FBI, with consequences no one can surely know. It was Mark Twain who
said, "In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech,
freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either."
The Control of Information
We have not yet come to perhaps the most serious issue of al in regard to freedom of
speech and press in the United States. Suppose al of the restrictions on freedom of speech
were suddenly removed—the Supreme Court's limitations on the absolute words of the First
Amendmen
t, the power of the local police over people wanting to express themselves, the
fear of losing one's job by speaking freely, and the chil on free speech caused by the secret
surveil ance of citizens by the FBI. Suppose we could say anything we want, without fear.
Two problems would stil remain. They are both enormous ones.
The first is Okay, suppose we can say what we want—how many people can we reach with
our message? A few hundred people, or 10 mil ion people? The answer is clear: It depends
on how much money we have.
Let's say no one can stop us from getting up on a soapbox and speaking our mind. We
might reach a hundred people that way. But if we were the Procter and Gamble Company,
which made the soapbox, we could buy prime time for commercials on television, buy ful -
page ads in newspapers, and reach several mil ion people.
169
In other words, freedom of speech is not simply a yes or no question. It is also a "how much" question. And how much freedom we have depends on how much money we have,
what power we have, and what resources we have for reaching large numbers of people. A
poor person, however smart, however eloquent, truly has very limited freedom of speech. A
rich corporation has a great deal of it.
The writer A. J. Liebling, who wrote about freedom of the press, put it this way, "The person
who has freedom of the press is the person who owns one."65 Owning a press gives you a
lot more freedom of speech than having to write a letter to your local newspaper, hoping
the editor publishes it. It takes more and more money to own a newspaper, and even if you
owned one, it is harder and harder to prevent it being taken over by some giant
corporation. At the end of World War II, more than 80 percent of the daily newspapers in
the United States were independently owned. Forty years later only 28 percent were
independent, the rest owned by outside corporations. And fifteen huge corporations
control ed half of the nation's newspaper business.66
Three television networks (CBS, ABC, and NBC) control about three-fourths of the prime
time on television. With 90 mil ion households owning TV sets, that gives those networks
enormous influence on the American mind. Ten publishing companies have half of the $10
bil ion in book sales. Four giants dominate the movie business.
Mergers and consolidations have created huge media empires, in which ordinary business
corporations have bought out publishers, television stations, and newspapers. For instance,
International Telephone and Telegraph (IT&T) merged with ABC television in the mid-
sixties. Time, Inc. and Warner Communications, Inc. joined in the 1980s to form the world's
largest media firm, worth $18 bil ion. Ben Bagdikian, dean of the Graduate School of
Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of The Media Monopoly,
summarized the situation: "When 50 men and women, chiefs of their corporations, control
more than half the information and ideas that reach 220 mil ion Americans, it is time for
Americans to examine the institutions from which they receive their daily picture of the
world."67
Not only is the usefulness of the First Amendment dependent on wealth, but when
occasional y a state legislature tries to remedy the situation slightly, the corporations plead
the First Amendment. This is what happened in 1977 when the Massachusetts legislature
said corporations could not spend money to influence a public referendum. The idea behind
the law was that corporations could so dominate the debate around a public issue as to
make freedom of speech on that issue meaningless for people without money.
The corporation lawyer, arguing before the Supreme Court, said, "Money is speech." (He
might have added, "And we have lots of money, so we should have lots of speech.") The
Supreme Court decided heroical y that the First National Bank of Boston should not be
deprived of its First Amendment rights by limiting its use of money to influence a
referendum.68
The Supreme Court is clearly reluctant to put meaning in the First Amendment by
recognizing the great inequality of resources and trying to do something about that. Back in
1969 it unanimously upheld the Federal Communications Commission's "fairness doctrine,"
which said people attacked on the air had a right to respond.69 But since then the Court has
refused to interfere with the moneyed powers in broadcasting and their ability to keep off
the air views they don't like.
170
In 1973 the Supreme Court decided that CBS had a right to refuse an ad placed by a group of business executives who opposed the war in Vietnam. Even the liberal Justice Wil iam O.
Douglas went along with the majority, arguing that the government should not interfere
with the right of CBS to sel time to whomever it wanted. In saying that, of course, it was
approving the right of CBS to interfere with the access of concerned citizens to television
time.70
Douglas argued that "TV and radio … are entitled to live under the laissez faire regime which
the First Amendment sanctions." He was succumbing to the basic flaw in al of laissez-faire
theory: It pretends to leave people free by keeping government out of a situation and
ignores the fact that they are then left to the mercy of the rich in society.
The fairness doctrine itself, which is at least a step toward insisting that the broadcast
media give time for opposing views, was considerably weakened by Congress in 1959, when
it exempted news conferences and debates. This means that the president or any of his
staff can hold news conferences, say whatever they want to a huge television audience,
with no opportunity for rebuttal by political critics of the president. It also means that in the
campaign for president, the debates between contenders can be limited to the Republican
and Democratic parties, excluding minor parties. The Democratic party chal enged the
provision on news conferences, but the Supreme Court would not hear its appeal. The
Socialist Workers party also went to court, claiming its presidential candidate had a right to
be heard by the public. The Court refused to take the case.71
The second enormous problem for free speech is this: Suppose no one—not government,
not the police, not our employer—stops us from speaking our mind, but we have nothing to
say. In other words what if we do not have sufficient information about what is happening in the country or in the world and do not know what our government is doing at home and
abroad? Without such information, having the freedom to express ourselves does not mean
much.
It is very difficult for the ordinary citizen to learn very much about what is going on, here or
in other countries. There is so much to know. Things are so complicated. But what if, in
addition to these natural limitations, there is a deliberate effort to keep us from knowing? In
fact, that is the case, through government influence on the media, through self-censorship
of the media (being prudent, as Mark Twain said), and through the government's lies and
deceptions.
There is no democratic conscience at work when the government decides that it must
manipulate the press on behalf of its foreign policy objectives. An editor of Strategic Review
(A. G. B. Metcalf, also chairman of the board of trustees of Boston Un
iversity), a right-wing
publication dealing with military strategy, delivered a stern warning to the media in 1983:
In a free democracy where every act, every appointment, every policy is
subject to public questioning and public pressure, the mass media have a
special responsibility for not impairing, in the name of free speech, the
credibility of its duly elected leadership upon whose success in a dangerous
world the maintenance of that freedom depends… . This is a matter which—in
the name of the First Amendment—has gotten completely out of hand.72
It's the old argument of national security. It goes like this: We are in a dangerous conflict
with a ruthless foe; our leaders are taking care of us in this conflict, so don't criticize them
too much. Sure, we have a free press, but it must behave responsibly. Trust our leaders.
Metcalf is a private citizen, but undoubtedly he reflected some of the thinking in the highest
circles of the government. Rather than trust the press to be responsible on its own, our
government, for a long time, has tried to use the press as an adjunct to official policy.
Sometimes it fails. Sometimes it succeeds. Here are a few examples of how it was done.
171
In 1954 the U.S. government was secretly planning to overthrow the democratical y elected government of Guatemala, which had decided to take back land from the United Fruit
Company. A New York Times correspondent there, Sidney Gruson, thought it was the job of
the press to report what it saw. His reports became troublesome. CIA Director Al en Dul es
contacted his old Princeton classmate, Julius Ochs Adler, business manager of the Times,
and Gruson was transferred to Mexico City.73
In late 1960 the editor of The Nation magazine, Carey McWil iams, was informed by a Latin
American specialist at Stanford University, just returned from Guatemala, that Cuban exiles
were being trained in that country by the United States for an invasion of Cuba. McWil iams
wrote an editorial on this and sent copies to al the major news media, including the
Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI). Neither the AP nor the UPI used
the story. Nine days later, the New York Times reported that the president of Guatemala
denied rumors of any pending invasion.74
