Minnesota Precedent

The First Amendment protects the press from overt Government intervention, and journalists enjoy rigorous self-criticism about as much as other mortals. Who then should systematically keep the news media honest? One proposed answer is press councils--voluntary bodies with both press and public representation that would hear specific complaints and judge them. Last year the Minnesota Press Association organized the first statewide council in the country. That body last week made its first finding, one that went against the press, and was accepted with good grace.

The St. Paul Union Advocate, a labor weekly, had charged that Minnesota House Majority Leader Ernest Lindstrom was taken to dinner by a liquor lobbyist, with the result that proposed liquor tax increases were dropped from pending legislation. Lindstrom protested that he had paid for his own meal and encountered the lobbyist only casually toward the end of it. He said that he personally favored the higher tax, and voted against it only to get a compromise bill passed by his colleagues. Lindstrom demanded a retraction from Union Advocate Editor Gordon Spielman, did not get it, and took his case to the press council. Spielman, himself one of the nine press representatives on the 18-member council, temporarily gave up his seat and appeared as defendant. He insisted that he had considered his sources for the story reliable, though he refused to reveal them.

After six weeks of mulling over the testimony, the council accused the Union Advocate of "failing to fulfill a professional journalistic obligation to check its information with the principals and others known to have been present." Though the group has neither legal standing nor machinery to enforce its decisions, it recommended that the Union Advocate print the remarks critical of itself. Said Spielman: "Of course I'll publish them. I had planned to all along."

All well and good, but councils might not work so smoothly in more complicated situations. Inevitably they would be slow and cumbersome. Besides, assembling councils that are widely accepted as disinterested would be difficult. Chances are, says former Presidential Press Secretary George Reedy, that they would be dismissed as "self-appointed committees of intellectual vigilantes."

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