Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 14, 1993 TAG: 9302150279
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT M. O'NEIL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
FREEDOM VS. PRIVACY
THE DEATH of Arthur Ashe robs the nation of an eloquent and courageous voice. For Virginians, there is special sadness in the loss of an exemplary native son. Quite recently, Ashe had favored the University of Virginia with several visits and talks. For me, the loss of a good friend and fellow foundation trustee is incalculable.In fact, I spent the morning in New York with him last April 7. After lunch, he returned to his office to find a phone message he must have dreaded for years.
That call dashed his hope of keeping his AIDS condition a secret until after death. It also created an acute dilemma for people like me who are good friends of both Ashe and freedom of the press. And it served to make vastly more painful the final few months of a heroic life.
Since April, there has been much debate (and much confusion) between what was lawful and what was right. As far as the First Amendment goes, I have not the slightest doubt about such a case. Information about Ashe's AIDS infection was accurate, and had great public interest.
The news had not been obtained unlawfully or even clandestinely. We were assured it would not have been used had he denied the report when confronted. In fact, had any attempt been made to restrain publication, I would have been among the first to resist such effort on constitutional grounds. Freedom of the press in this country leaves to editors and publishers the choice whether - and when - to print.
Nonetheless, I like to think (even if Ashe were not a friend) that I would have withheld publication had the choice been mine. There are times - and this is one - when having the right to publish does not mean that publishing is necessarily right.
Even if an invasive or intrusive story may be published with complete impunity, and even if many will read it eagerly, the larger importance of such a choice is inescapable.
Where disclosure may deeply wound a person - even a public person - that prospect must be seen as part of the public interest bearing on such a decision.
Analogies are not terribly helpful. To compare Ashe to Magic Johnson, for example, misses the mark. Johnson courageously chose to come forward and to share his condition with the nation. His doing so aided immensely the quest for safer sex and healthy precautions.
In Ashe's case, by contrast, the one relevant health measure - ability to detect HIV-infected blood - had emerged years earlier. These two superficially similar cases are in fact so different as to refute any claim of analogy.
It would be concern enough if one person's welfare and that of his family were the sole risk of such a revelation. Much deeper, there is also a serious risk to the very freedom that ensured an editor's choice in this case.
Liberties, like muscles, need to be constantly exercised in order to sustain maximum health. The 201-year survival of our First Amendment guarantees - by far the oldest in the world - reflects the vigilance of writers, speakers, authors, publishers and other creative persons. Our freedoms would languish in a world of bland copy, in print or on the air.
Yet there is a point beyond which the stretching and testing of free expression invites danger. Severe and needless invasions of privacy make would-be censors restive. One need only look to the proposal last month by a British government inquiry of new privacy laws termed by the London Times "the most draconian curbs on the press ever seen in modern Britain."
With some complacency, we tend to say "it can't happen here." One surely hopes it can't - and for that matter, we hope that Parliament will have the good sense to find better ways of protecting privacy than levying large fines on the press.
Of course the press had every right to print every truthful word about Ashe's health. But by doing so, they may have made it harder for those of us who champion a free press to defend the very right of choice they exercised. Maintaining freedoms does not mean we need always push their limits.
Robert M. O'Neil is director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression in Charlottesville.