The Bill of Rights and "Prior Restraint:" The Tobacco Companies as Censors

Rating: Null/10 (7 March 2003)

Back when good old James Madison was thinking and ciphering and scribbling up the Bill of Rights, the phrase `freedom of the press' had a specific meaning: freedom from `prior restraint,' which meant that publishers no longer had to submit their articles to a board of censors for approval before going to press. To the censors, just because something was true didn't mean it would be approved; on the contrary, the truer something was, the more dangerous it could have been as an instrument of sedition and insurrection.
What an irony, then, that 200 years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the tobacco companies have the power, and authority, to exercise `prior restraint' censorship on matters of fundamental and vital interest to the public welfare. It's as if the tobacco industry has become the pre-Revolutionary equivalent of an oppressive board of censors. I suspicion that it would have made Madison's blood boil. Ain't that a corker?
Not since All the President's Men has such a significant, insightful, beautifully presented and dramatically poignant documentary film  an embellished but basically true tragedy of epic Greek proportions  been released. On the one side, you have Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), a producer for CBS's `60 Minutes,' whose mission is to communicate vital information to an informed, voting populace. On the other, there is Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), a former tobacco executive, who faces a monumental moral dilemma: on the one hand, he knows the dirty secrets of the tobacco industry, and deeply feels his duty to expose them; on the other hand, he is bound by his confidentiality agreement with Brown and Williamson, which he also feels duty bound to honor. Worse yet, Wigand faces an array of profoundly negative personal consequences if he decides to go public. Needless to say, no one would blame him if he decided to protect himself and keep quiet. But to talk, well, that's as valorous a deed as ever accomplished on a field of battle.
This is a true `must see' video.