Parties: Houchins v. KQED, Inc.
Date: 1978-06-26
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Paragraph: 40 - There is no constitutional right to have access to particular government information, or to require openness from the bureaucracy. [Citing Pell v. Procunier, supra.] The public's interest in knowing about its government is protected by the quarantee of a Free Press, but the protection is indirect. The Constitution itself is neither a Freedom of Information Act nor an Official Secrets Act.
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Paragraph: 53 - That the First Amendment speaks separately of freedom of speech and freedom of the press is no constitutional accident, but an acknowledgment of the critical role played by the press in American society. The Constitution requires sensitivity to that role, and to the special needs of the press in performing it effectively.
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Paragraph: 92 - An official prison policy of concealing such knowledge from the public by arbitrarily cutting off the flow of information at its source abridges the freedom of speech and of the press protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
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Paragraph: 50 - The First and Fourteenth Amendments do not guarantee the public a right of access to information generated or controlled by government, nor do they guarantee the press any basic right of access superior to that of the public generally. The Constitution does no more than assure the public and the press equal access once government has opened its doors.
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Paragraph: 27 - Branzburg v. Hayes, supra, offers even less support for the respondents' position. Its observation, in dictum, that N150* "news gathering is not without its First Amendment protections," 408 U.S., at 707, 92 S.Ct., at 2670, in no sense implied a constitutional right of access to news sources. That observation must be read in context; it was in response to the contention that forcing a reporter to disclose to a grand jury information received in confidence would violate the First Amendment by deterring news sources from communicating information. Id., at 680, 92 S.Ct., at 633. There is an undoubted right to gather news "from any source by means within the law," id., at 681-682, 92 S.Ct., at 2657, but that affords no basis for the claim that the First Amendment compels others—private persons or governments—to supply information.
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Paragraph: 32 - Pell v. Procunier, and Saxbe v. Washington Post Co., also assumed that there is no constitutional right of access such as the Court of Appeals conceived. In those cases the Court declared, explicitly and without reservation, that the media have N151* "no constitutional right of access to prisons or their inmates beyond that afforded the general public," Pell, 417 U.S., at 834, 94 S.Ct., at 2810, Saxbe, 417 U.S., at 850, 94 S.Ct., at 2815, and on that premise the Court sustained prison regulations that prevented media interviews with inmates.
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Paragraph: 44 - Neither the First Amendment nor the Fourteenth Amendment mandates a right of access to government information or sources of information within the government's control.
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Paragraph: 25 - In discussing the importance of an "untrammeled press," the Court in Grosjean readily acknowledged the need for "informed public opinion" as a restraint upon misgovernment. 297 U.S., at 250, 56 S.Ct., at 449. N246* It also criticized the tax at issue because it limited "the circulation of information to which the public [was] entitled." Ibid. But nothing in the Court's holding implied a special privilege of access to information as distinguished from a right to publish information which has been obtained; Grosjean dealt only with government attempts to burden and restrain a newspaper's communication with the public. The reference to a public entitlement to information meant no more than that the government cannot restrain communication of whatever information the media acquire—and which they elect to reveal.
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Paragraph: 27 - There is an undoubted right to gather news N247* "from any source by means within the law," id., at 681-682, 92 S.Ct., at 2657, but that affords no basis for the claim that the First Amendment compels others—private persons or governments—to supply information.
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Paragraph: 34 - "There are few restrictions on action which could not be clothed by ingenious argument in the garb of decreased data flow. For example, the prohibition of unauthorized entry into the White House diminishes the citizen's opportunities to gather information he might find relevant to his opinion of the way the country is being run, but that does not make entry into the White House a First Amendment right. N248* The right to speak and publish does not carry with it the unrestrained right to gather information."
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Paragraph: 92 - In this case, the record demonstrates that both the public and the press had been consistently denied any access to the inner portions of the Santa Rita jail, that there had been excessive censorship of inmate correspondence, and that there was no valid justification for these broad restraints on the flow of information. An affirmative answer to the question whether respondents established a likelihood of prevailing on the merits did not depend, in final analysis, on any right of the press to special treatment beyond that accorded the public at large. Rather, the probable existence of a constitutional violation rested upon the special importance of allowing a democratic community access to knowledge about how its servants were treating some of its members who have been committed to their custody. An official prison policy of concealing such knowledge from the public by arbitrarily cutting off the flow of information at its source abridges the freedom of speech and of the press protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
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