We are in a second generation of Americans whose lifetime experience has been that whatever the Fist Amendment says in words, in practice it means "Yes, but"

Many current restrictions have origins in the cold war, which became a war to contain not only the Soviet Union but the media as well. At crucial times, major news organizations cooperated in their own containment. In important areas of government operations, they developed a highly selective incuriosity. Or they took at face value obvious lies and deceptions that, in other segments of American society, they would have enthusiastically pursued and exposed.

What makes such behavior all the more depressing is that the media regard the First Amendment as "their" amendment and traditionally say they are the public's guardian of the right of free speech and expression.

In the early cold war years even the wildest political lunacy was accorded the passive spectatorship or active cheerleading of most of the media. For years, most major newspapers and broadcasters ignored accumulting documentation of the lies and absurdities of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

When The New York Times and The Washington Post started to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and the government successfully obtained prior restraint, the initial response of most of the rest of the media was not furious protest but tacit acceptance. Later, although the Watergate scandal was grave enough to cause the resignation of a president to avoid impeachment, thirty of the nation's largest dailies either did not run or drastically downplayed the Post's pre-election Watergte stories.

In 1979, the government prosecuted The Progressive for violation of the most shocking censorship law since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. The bulk of the country's major media, print and broadcast, had been allowed to violate that law for more than thirty years. Yet in this case they either urged on the government or stayed aloof. Only one major paper, the Chicago Tribune, voiced instant moral support for The Progressive, and only one publication, Playboy, contributed money for the magazine's defense. A few small dailies supported the magazine, but only late in the suit did a few major dailies reverse their support of the government.

At stake was no arcane or ambiguous principle of free expression. The censorship clause of the Atomic Energy Act of 1947 makes it a felony to publish without authorization anything about nuclear fission, including use of nuclear materials in the production of atomic energy. The act was, and remains, an absolute ban, with no qualifications or loopholes.

In the 1980s, the Iran-contra operations, which posed an even greater threat to constitutional government than the Watergate scandal, were exposed not by any one of the thousands of accredited American journalists in Washington but by an obscure publication in Beirut.

In 1990, when the extraordinary gulf war reporting rules were announced, not one major news organization joined smaller journalistic organs in a legal protest, even though there were good reasons to be suspicious of the government's motives.

Nothing in the First Amendment prevents the government form withholding certain things fromthe public, though the greater the areas of secrecy the weaker the democracy. But the First Amendment guarantees that if a journalist or other citizen learns something about the government, he or she is free to report and discuss it.

Major news groups need to be vigilant in their support of the First Amendment, including those occasions when freedom of expression is denied to ideas and publications the big media dislike. Ceremonial fireworks and flag-draped full-page ads are nice, but they aren't enough. The "guardian of the First Amendment" will have to stop sleeping at its post.

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