Leaks to the Press as Communication within and between Organizations

Contrary to the myth which has grown up around investigative journalism, few ofthe major political scandals of the last decade have been uncovered solely by the persistent digging of the press. Most such stories have been broken only after crucial details were leaked by someone in the bureaucracy. The wholesale leak of classified documents, for example, brought the Pentagon Papers to the attention ofthe world. And the unraveling of the Watergate scandal—a feat generally credited to the industry of two reporters—would have been incomplete or impossible if it were not for leaks by government investigators.' Leaks have become a principal means by which the inner-workings of bureaucracies are exposed to the scrutiny ofthe press and public. Leaking dates back at least to 1844 when a senator arranged for publication of a treaty which President Tyler hoped to sneak through the Senate in executive session. Tyler's ''strategem was defeated.''^ But the term *'leak,'' coined in the early twentieth century, was originally applied to inadvertent slips in which information was picked up by reporters.-^ The word quickly acquired a broader, more active meaning: any calculated release of information to reporters with the stipulation that the source remain unidentified. A variety of formal press-official interactions have institutionalized leaking, most notably background briefings in which information can be attributed to a veiled source (e.g., ''high official," ''spokesman"), and deep background press