u/FreedomofPress

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently ordered the release of more than 170,000 pages of city records about the air quality in Lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks. This release, the first in a series of planned disclosures, shows how opening decades-old records, including those that expose government wrongdoing, is in the public interest. Political will to expand such efforts elsewhere is crucial.

The executive order governing classification, EO 13526, mandates that most historical records must be automatically declassified at 25 years, unless they meet certain strict criteria.

In theory, this means the records of the defining national tragedy of this century should start becoming public on Dec. 31. In practice, the declassification system is so ineffective that millions of pages are all but certain to remain hidden in agency archives from Quantico to Langley for years, possibly even decades, whether or not they require continued protection.

This impedes justice on multiple fronts.

Read more: https://www.ms.now/opinion/9-11-victims-declassifying-records-intelligence-threats

In the 1990s, CBS infamously spiked a damning “60 Minutes” interview with whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand about the tobacco industry because the network’s lawyers feared it could be sued for encouraging him to violate a nondisclosure agreement with his former employer, a tobacco company.

Three decades later, Madison Square Garden is trying to use the legal theory that CBS’ lawyers once feared, now against Wired magazine.

MSG’s new lawsuit is the latest example of a private litigant trying to wield a legal claim known as “tortious interference with contract” against journalists who rely on sources bound by confidentiality agreements.

Under the First Amendment, the claim is baseless, but that doesn’t make it harmless. Lawsuits like these discourage investigative reporting by making newsgathering riskier and more expensive, and by putting confidential sources at risk of being exposed.

Medical journal articles, like research from nonprofits and facts exposed through litigation, are often cited by journalists as source material in coverage of everything from outbreaks to drug recalls to promising new treatments.

When they’re censored, so is the news that reaches newspaper pages and the public.