What If G-Men Went After the Washington Post as They’re Going After the Enquirer?
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
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Imagine that a federal prosecutor had gone after The Washington Post Company back in the 1990s on the theory that the reluctance of its magazine, Newsweek, to publish an article about a sex scandal involving Bill Clinton constituted an illegal campaign contribution to the Clinton campaign.
The ensuing outcry and fear that prosecutors would begin substituting their own news judgment for that of editors wouldn’t have been limited to First Amendment absolutists like Nat Hentoff. It would almost certainly have been widely shared. And justifiably so.
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