There is an unanswered question that we did not address in Monday’s observation in this space about the governor’s accusation that a newspaper had “hacked” a state education department website.
It is unfortunate that Governor Parson refused to take questions after last week’s press conference in which he said he wants St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Josh Renaud criminally charged for notifying the state he had found personal information about thousands of school teachers easily obtainable from a Department of Education website.
Someone should have asked—and we are confident WOULD have asked—“Did the story tell the truth?”
That has been the critical question for 300 years whenever a United States political figure does not like what a reporter has written about him or her—since 1734 when New York’s Royal Governor, William Cosby, jailed newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger for eight months on a charge of libel. Cosby proclaimed Zenger’s criticisms of his actions amounted to “divers scandalous, virulent, false and seditious reflections,” an 18th Century equivalent, perhaps, to Governor Parson’s complaint that the Post-Dispatch and Renaud were involved in a “political game” intended to “embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet.”
The jury in the Zenger trial was out for only ten minutes before finding him not guilty. His attorney had argued that a statement cannot be libelous if it is true regardless of the discomfort it causes someone, in this case the Royal Governor. More than fifty years later, Freedom of the Press became part of the nation’s constitution.
More than a century ago, a Missouri Capitol reporter was jailed for reporting the truth. Robert Holloway of the long-defunct St. Louis Republic was jailed after reporting in 1917 that a Cole County Grand Jury had indicted a top state official for selling coal from the state’s coal supply. The official was John W. Scott, the former Commissioner of the Permanent Seat of Government. Holloway also reported the grand jury was investigating whether Penitentiary Warden D. C. McClung improperly used state property. Grand jury proceedings, even today, are supposed to be secret.
His story ran before any indictments had been made public, leading the judge who had convened the grand jury to haul Holloway before him to tell where he had gotten his information. When Holloway refused to reveal his source, the judge jailed him until he talked, or until that grand jury’s term ran out. The Missouri Supreme Court upheld the order.
State Historical Society Executive Director Gary Kremer, who wrote about the Holloway case for the Jefferson City newspaper several years ago, has a picture of Holloway seated at his typewriter next to a barred jail window as he continued to report, his stories datelined “Cole County Jail.” He finally was released after two months on a promise to appear before a new grand jury if it called him. It refused to take up the whole issue when it was convened. Those who had been indicted by the earlier grand jury were found not guilty. Holloway remained a reporter, off and on, for most of the next three decades.
But he remains, as far as we have been able to determine, the only Capitol reporter ever jailed by the state of Missouri for telling the truth.
The governor’s call for Cole County Prosecutor Locke Thompson to take action against the newspaper gives Thompson a lot to think about. There’s the First Amendment protection of press freedom. The newspaper attorney doubts the state’s law on computer tampering sufficiently applies to this case because the computer code allowing anyone to access the information was readily available through the Department of Education’s website.
There might also be a question of whether the state law on computer tampering is unconstitutional prior restraint on reporting information gained through legal means from a state computer. And proving the newspaper published the information with malicious or criminal intent will be difficult. To the contrary, the newspaper’s actions to withhold the story until the department fixed the problem the investigation pinpointed is a strong argument against criminal intent.
But the basic question remains. Did the reporter tell the truth? There is no acceptable “yes, but” response. Zenger-Holloway-Renaud (or the name of any reporter since 1734) are linked together by that question.
And that is the only question that matters.