Guest Writer
Guest Opinion
TOM MILLER
Everyone has had a run-in with the Tucson Citizen. My run-in has stuck with me all these years.
In early 1972, when I was writing primarily for the underground, anti-war press, I was subpoenaed to a federal grand jury in Tucson.
It was a special grand jury set up by the Nixon Justice Department to investigate radical activity.
A number of these grand juries were set up around the country, and those they called as witnesses were in the outer circle of radical activity but known to have contacts with the inner circle.
I moved to quash my subpoena based on First Amendment grounds that to haul a reporter behind closed doors would, in effect, compromise freedom of the press.
It became a nationally known freedom-of-the-press case, and dozens of journalists and editors around the country, including a few in Tucson, wrote affidavits on my behalf – among them Julie Szekeley and Dennis Eskow of the Citizen.
The Tucson Citizen editorialized against me, saying I wasn’t really a journalist, just someone who wrote for the radical underground.
And it fired Szekeley and Eskow for having the temerity to write affidavits – actually very simple statements saying they’d seen me cover events – on my behalf.
U.S. District Judge William Frey agreed with me, and I never had to testify.
Still, in my mind, the Tucson Citizen, though many editors and owners later, will always stand out as the one newspaper in America that came out against the First Amendment.
I should add as a postscript that a number of years later, the Citizen, under subsequent management, editorialized in favor of a First Amendment press shield law. I was off the paper’s blacklist and wrote a few pieces for Dave Mitchell’s weekend supplement, “Ole!”
Tom Miller is a Tucson author.