The journalist who is committed to the open society, to democratic values, has a moral structure from which to work, an alertness to institutions and their activities that threaten the right of anyone to take part justly, equally and freely in a meaningful community life. Any word or deed that denies this way of life to people because of their sex, age, race, sexual preference, origin, religion or position in society must be revealed by the journalist.

WhenTimes columnist Anthony Lewis learned that the Nixon administration had made a deal with Vice President Spiro Agnew for his resignation in return for the promise of a nonprison sentence on his plea of "no contest" to a felony, he wrote that this was the correct action. It was right, Lewis said, on "political grounds: the need to investigate the president's wrongdoing without having as his potential successor someone who was himself under indictment."

But Lewis then had second thoughts following the sentencing to prison of two businessmen who confessed to corrupt payments to Agnew during his governorship of Maryland . "So they go to prison," Lewis wrote, "while the sleazy felon who soiled our politics earns $100,000 in his new career as 'business broker.'" Instead of trusting the democratic institutions of law and politics to work, Lewis wrote, the attorney general had made personal policy.

"That unhappy precedent was carried further in the pardon of Richard Nixon," he wrote. "Of course, Watergate is not alone in examples of law applied unequally. It is commonplace, and terribly damaging to our system of criminal justice, for the powerful to go free while the little wrongdoers go to prison."