If the post-Watergate years were a time of growing power for this country's press, the coming years will be an era of retrenchment. Will this reversal of trends do serious damage to First Amendment freedoms? That depends in part on how journalists themselves react to the changes.

The media, as their critics often neglect to point out, did not enlarge their power after Watergate by elbowing they way to the top of the heap over the active opposition of everyone else in the political arena. The cultural upheaval that began in the 1960s changed political institutions ranging from the major parties to interest groups and government bureaucracies. Some of these organizations reformed themselves in ways that made the press more important to their operations. Some lost self-confidence and easily, even gratefully, ceded power to the journalists.

So the press was not so imperial as some have portrayed it. But, as the dust settled in the 1980s, it was the powerful press that most visibly symbolized the drastic changes of the preceding twenty years. Its new prominence, in turn, exposed more of the workings of the process to public scrutiny. In the process, the press came less and less to seem like a faithful surrogate for the public, whose alleged "right to know" journalists used as a kind of universal search warrant. Sources and news consumers alike became much more aware of the press as an institution with its own survival requirements, private interests, and sometimes unattractive ways of tending to those needs.

One of these methods is the way in which journalists use or misuse their sources and, more generally, treat individuals mentioned in their stories. Thus, an increasingly familiar figure in American courtrooms today is the individual plaintiff who claims that some news outlet has wronged him or her through betrayal or gross negligence. The press organization being sued is usually a substantial one (if it were not financially healthy, there would be little point in suing it). The drama in the courtroom is not the story of the press on one side, representing the people, and the rich, selfish private interests on the other. Instead, the news organizations are the powerful establishment and the plaintiff is the plucky underdog. Juries, when given a chance, seem to get a real kick out of awarding big damages to individuals they have judged to be hurt by the press.

This attitude has also been reflected outside the legal system, and journalists can count less and less on the natural support of the public. In the years to come, government and private bureaucracies, from the military to big corporations, are likely to try to take advantage of this shift in attitude to cut back on journalists' access to information. The press may also be the loser when legislatures consider certain types of privacy laws.

Under circumstances like these, there is a powerful temptation for news organizations to try to rally support by crying "First Amendment" when they are attacked, especially in the courts. But it is hard for outside observers to be persuaded that the First Amendment, protector of individual conscience against institutional authority, was meant as a guard dog for the large, entrenched media organizations that are parties to these cases. Instead, the use of First Amendment arguments by the press looks like a smokescreen to hide less highminded, more selfish motives.

This past spring, in a Washington Post op-ed piece, the eminent First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, who has defended news organizations in many important cases, gave examples of this problem. In one much-discussed recent case, two Minnesota newspapers were sued by a source claiming that the papers had breached their promise to keep his name confidential. What the papers did, Abrams argued, was "contrary to the core principles of journalistic ethics." Yet they asked the court to protect them, because they were journalists, from the normal obligations of the law. In the even better-known matter of Janet Malcolm's New Yorker article, the magazine contended that even if out-and-out fabrications were involved, the First Amendment should protect it from being sued for wrongdoing. Once again, it is hard to ignore the confusion at work between the purposes for which the First Amendment was created and the interests for which it was being used.

It is little wonder that the Supreme Court opinions in both cases were so unsatisfactory from the press's institutional point of view. Such results invite still further challenges to the press, and at least some of them sill surely do real damage to First Amendment protections.

Attacks on the press will continue in the years just ahead. Those who are genuinely attached to the First Amendment and its purposes have an obligation to take care in picking the places at which to fight back and claim First Amendment protections. In exercising this care, nothing is more important than to distinguish, in a way that has not been so necessary before, between using the amendment to protect the people's right to know and using it as a shield for a news organization's wrongdoing. If news organizations do not make this distinction, others will be more than happy to do the job.

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