What is black and white and contains satirical commentary, world information and your local weather? Nope, not your awesome text-messaging Blackberry. Not your daily e-mail update. I’m talking about your average newspaper.

If you can think back all the way to the beginning of this year, maybe you’ll remember that I wrote a column on free speech. Here in the United States, it is taken for granted much too often and for that matter, often used in a non-constructive way. But what about the other part of the first amendment, the one that talks about freedom of the press? How is that right limited or expressed in the land of the some of the top newspapers, like The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post and more?

In my ever-enlightening, challenging and of course, incredibly well-taught (that’s for you, Professor Moeller) Civil Rights and Liberties course this semester, we’ve spent the last few class periods talking about freedom of the press and the implications of upholding this right. One of the most interesting cases we’ve studied thus far is the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court Case New York Times v. United States. During the Vietnam War, when the U.S. government and public were faced with a constant game of secrecy and uncertainty, The New York Times, along with a few other national newspapers, had received several thousand pages of documents discussing the history of United States involvement in Indochina. I am sure you can imagine how interested the American public was in what today has become one of America’s most “hush-hush” topics.

Needless to say, the government freaked out about the distribution of these papers. The funny thing is, there really was no huge corruptive plan in handing over these papers. Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst and employee of the State Department, got ahold of them and didn’t even share them until quite a while later. It wasn’t until he felt a conscious need to share these with the public that he handed them over to several newspapers.

Though the government tried to argue against it, there must have been something pretty controversial in those papers, if Ellsberg was telling the truth about being so thoroughly disturbed. Eventually, the Court ruled in his favor, stating that the government had not come up with sufficient proof, though the writing of nine separate opinions regarding the subject made it clear that discussion of the subject was far from being finished.

I was thinking about this case and wondering what would happen if I opened up the paper tomorrow and saw something like the top-secret Iraq papers had been discovered and leaked to the public. I don’t know for certain, but I presume the current administration wouldn’t be too pleased with this.

I wonder, though, how the American people would feel about that. There are so many questions that arise with the unearthing of documents like that. Many feel the public should know, and others feel that’s why they have elected officials in office who could make the judgment call on what to do in foreign policy dilemmas and also domestic affairs.

How much secrecy is OK and acceptable in the government? Don’t people have a right to know what their elected officials are doing? Then again, does the public want to know everything? And if that is the case, doesn’t the press, under the First Amendment have a right to print that information? I am sure there is more than just one Eliot Spitzer in public office. And at what point do we take away the privacy rights of officials? Do they have more protection than the average citizen or are they held to a higher standard?

I don’t know, kids, but this is a tough one. Where do you draw a line? It’s no wonder the media and the courts alike both struggle with this (tabloids, anyone?). But perhaps it comes down to telling the good old-fashioned truth. And that is something no government or media should try to keep secret.