A number of government folks will say today that the press’s pugnacity post-Pentagon papers was a creation of the 6 to 3 court decision’s turgid prose.
That a sort of oppositional defiant disorder did not exist in nature; that there was never a common law understanding of the press’s role in a a democracy, so that the press and the government had a shared understanding of what constituted national security and bargained informally, more or less towards a status quo, beforehand.
It doesn’t quite get at the fissures within the press; an increasing number of journalists, editors and publishers were increasingly militant about policing government power because of Vietnam and the Civil Rights crusades of the decades prior; the field of journalism was already debating how close (if at all) journalists had to keep their sources; a number of prominent voices —
The New York Times and the Washington Post were not the leaders of this debate, but as the most powerful journalistic institutions in the country, outside of perhaps CBS News, it was perhaps inevitable that they would wind up resolving it, at least temporarily.
