Does the public care about its right to know?

Seasoned reporters who cover the $1 trillion-plus Defense Department are finding themselves turned into stenographers. Fox News host-turned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth performed the transformation last month. Reporters covering the Pentagon must pledge to refrain from reporting on information that has not been authorized for release, even if it is unclassified. Reporters who fail to comply risk losing their Pentagon press credentials.

So much for enterprise reporting, the urgent flipping of rocks to see what lies beneath. Media organizations and some lawmakers are pushing back, but does the public at large care?

The spectacle takes me back to 1970. I’m sitting in a downtown Cedar Rapids theater watching the hit disaster movie “Airport.” Poor Burt Lancaster. Playing an airport manager, he is battling numerous problems – an epic snowstorm, a mad bomber in a plane, a marriage meltdown.

It’s all hushed-up. The airlines troubleshooter (George Kennedy) is asked about the public’s right to know. “Y’know,” he sneers around his cigar, “Sometimes the public’s right to know gives me a huge pain in the ass.”

The Paramount theater audience laughs and cheers at this stereotyping of the nosey, rude reporter.

The 30-year-old me is not amused. In my eight years as a Gazette reporter – public safety, then city hall – I have repeatedly butted heads with officials who end run the public’s right to know.

An example: Trying to get wet-process industries to pay their share of sewage treatment costs, the city council is holding secret meetings. I learn about one such session two days later. “Don’t you know,” I say to a council member, “state law requires that meetings of tax-gathering entities be open except for real estate deliberations and personnel matters.”

The official answers with a chuckle, “The meeting did involve personnel. We were meeting with personnel from Penick & Ford.”

Other Gazette reporters were seeing similar runarounds. I gather they still are. The picture remains the same. News people’s relationships with sources are friendly but necessarily adversarial. How and when should news be reported? The sides often disagree.

Politicians have creative ways of showing their disdain. In 2022, Iowa Republican legislators banned journalists from press benches on the Senate floor. The spiteful action ended a more than 120-year tradition.

Such stunts are not politically risky. Polls invariably reflect low public regard for news gatherers.

That seems strange. Though employed by private companies, reporters consider themselves quasi-public servants. They emerge from journalism school eager to give people information they need, deserve and want. Yet their frustration over news blackouts evokes little public concern.

President Donald Trump is banking on that indifference. Having called reporters “enemies of the people” during his first term, he is ramping up his scorn this time around. As with the fictional blowhard in “Airport,” the public’s right to know pains Trump’s backside.

Hence the Hegseth-transmitted order telling Pentagon reporters to shut up and just take notes.

The people should be appalled. I hope polling shows it.

The unprecedented gagging of reporters takes the First Amendment bedrock of press freedom – penned by our Founders – and grinds it into dust.

Writer-editor Jerry Elsea is retired after 40 years with The Gazette.