What If G-Men Went After the Washington Post as They’re Going After the Enquirer?
Imagine that a federal prosecutor had gone after The Washington Post Company back in the 1990s on the theory that the reluctance of its magazine, Newsweek, to publish an article about a sex scandal involving Bill Clinton constituted an illegal campaign contribution to the Clinton campaign.
The ensuing outcry and fear that prosecutors would begin substituting their own news judgment for that of editors wouldn’t have been limited to First Amendment absolutists like Nat Hentoff. It would almost certainly have been widely shared. And justifiably so.
As Newsweek itself eventually found out via Matt Drudge, and as the framers of the First Amendment well understood, free-market competition is better regulation of press behavior than any second-guessing by government lawyers threatening criminal prosecution based on creative theories of campaign finance law.
https://www.nysun.com/national/what-if-g-men-went-after-washington-post-as-they/90499/