by Eric Misener

Created on: January 26, 2009

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that Congress "shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech or of the press." While the plain meaning of this phrase prohibits the government from directly suppressing the reporting and analysis of media outlets and private citizens, there are many ways in which an administration can affect what can be said about its policies and procedures. The easiest, and usually least controversial, of these methods is to limit the pool of information upon which citizens and the media can comment. Without knowing the facts upon which a government bases its policies, it is very difficult to intelligently report or analyze the efficacy or desirability of those policies. In such cases, the citizenry has no choice but to "trust" that the government's policies and the implementations thereof are rational and in the country's best interests.

This arrangement may be workable in cases in which the government's interests and the best interests of the citizenry coincide, and when a government is composed only of competent people who always act in a manner to benefit the group. As we know, however, such an instance is likely best relegated to the realm of fantasy. Governments are made up of human beings, and are subject to the same caprices and shortcomings to which each of us is vulnerable. Further, an administration may have interests that lie outside those that accrue to the country at large. For instance, one common interest of every administration is to maintain power. This interest is not necessarily dependant on the value of the government to the people. When an administration acts in a manner that it believes will not be met approvingly by the electorate, it is in that government's interest to either keep those acts secret from the citizenry, or to control the way in which the citizenry perceives those acts. One way to do this is to control the amount, and type, of information that is available to the general public.

Because of these factors, governments often have an incentive to hide information from media outlets that are charged with informing people about their government. Further, those media outlets may also have an interest in controlling the way information is perceived. In a system where media outlets are increasingly controlled by smaller numbers of larger organizations, the natural tendency of many different viewpoints to vet information for accuracy is suppressed. That is, when a piece of information

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