At first blush, accused Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s pending motion for permission to give media interviews-including one with a famous TV journalist, to be chosen from a gaggle of eager applicants who have already auditioned for the opportunity-might seem an occasion for revulsion.

Here’s how the prosecution characterized the motion in a seething Aug. 29 court response filed with Chief Judge Richard Matsch, of the U.S. District Court in Denver:

"McVeigh… seeks this court’s authorization of an extraordinary attempt to manipulate the news media to produce a favorable impact on the potential jury pool. According to the motion, defendant’s counsel has already met with such well-known television reporters as Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and others-and now wants to ‘choose among’ them the one least likely to ‘exploit’ an interview of Mr. McVeigh, ‘brow-beat’ the defendant, or ask Mr. McVeigh questions ‘he cannot answer.’… Mr. McVeigh also has ‘interviewed’ representatives of major national newspapers, and now wants to choose among them as well…. And he wants to make a similar selection from among local television and newspaper reporters."

But the motion should be granted. (Indeed, even the prosecution’s response, which exudes distaste for the motion, stops short of explicitly urging that it be denied.) Meanwhile, the media should spurn any conditions restricting what they can say about McVeigh before or after airing any interviews.

This spectacle raises two distinct questions, one of law and one of journalistic ethics:

Should courts allow McVeigh (who is in jail awaiting trial) and other accused monsters to give media interviews when their primary purpose is obviously to curry sympathy with the jury pool?

And how should the media deal with efforts by such defendants and their lawyers to impose conditions designed to guarantee that they will be presented in the most sympathetic possible light?

The legal question becomes relatively easy if one takes seriously the constitutional presumption of innocence.

Like many Americans, I am all but convinced that McVeigh murdered 168 men, women, and children-and is thus unspeakably evil-largely because of what I’ve read in newspapers about the evidence and his post-arrest conduct. I therefore recoil viscerally from the spectacle of Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Tom Brokaw, et al., making nice to this probable monster in the hope of being awarded a journalistic coup.

But the presumption of innocence argues for deciding the media-access question based on the hypothesis that McVeigh-against whom the government seeks the death penalty-is in fact the wrongly accused innocent he claims to be.

As a general First Amendment proposition, anyone in this country can give an interview to anyone he wants, anytime he wants, about anything he wants, for any purpose he wants. Why should a presumptively innocent defendant be denied this right?

It’s true that the Supreme Court has upheld restrictions on pretrial media interviews of jailed defendants based on (sometimes pretextual) concerns about institutional order and security, such as lack of secure interviewing facilities, the possibility of sparking riots, and such. But McVeigh’s jailers have raised no such concern in this case. Nor has the Justice Department expressed any concern that McVeigh will use media interviews to incite new terrorist acts, or to signal confederates about an escape plot, or any such thing. In short, there’s no reason he should be less free to give interviews than if he were free on bail.

The only real argument for restricting interviews by McVeigh is that he is trying to influence fee jury pool But the argument is unpersuasive.

Courts do often impose gag orders on lawyers– and Judge Matsch has imposed one here-to insulate potential jurors from prejudicial pretrial publicity, which has been so massive in McVeigh’s case as to spur a change of venue from Oklahoma City to Denver. And some courts have become all too ready to extend such gag orders to defendants as well, especially since the 0 J. Simpson trial and acquittal spread concern about the danger of big trials degenerating into media circuses, and of jurors disregarding the evidence. (There is surprisingly little case law on this, because so few defendants want to talk to the media.)

But while lawyers representing parties in pending cases are officers of the court, and thus subject to the court’s rules, as the Supreme Court stressed in Gentile v. State Bar of Nevada (1991), defendants are involuntary participants in the proceedings. Their constitutional rights to freedom of speech should be restricted only when indispensable to insuring a fair trial.

And in McVeigh’s case, media interviews depicting him as a human being rather than a monster-at least in outward appearance-would further, rather than detract from, the goal of a fair trial before jurors not strongly predisposed toward either side.

The ideal, of course, is (in the words of Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s opinion m Gentile) a trial "by Impartial jurors, who know as little as possible of the case" in advance. But that ideal is unattainable in a case like McVeigh’s. He has been hit with an avalanche of adverse publicity (not all of it accurate), depicting him as a mass murderer motivated by right-wing lunacy, and has been shown repeatedly on television shackled and under heavy guard. Such publicity and such dire images may predispose potential jurors to convict In this context, any success that the defense may have in orchestrating a bit of humanizing publicity would be at best a modest and salutary counterweight to the massive publicity depicting him as a monster.

This is especially true because McVeigh seeks here not to publicize evidence that would be inadmissible in court, or tendentious arguments about the facts of the case-which he refuses to discuss-but to present an image of himself smiling, chatting informally, and coming across as a regular guy, so as to "stop the rush to judgment of guilt [and] soften the less than human sculpture that the government has chiseled into the consciousness of the nation," in the words of his lawyer, Stephen Jones.

Michael Tigar, counsel for McVeigh’s co-defendant Terry Nichols, said in his own response to McVeigh’s motion that if they are tried together, Nichols might be prejudiced-particularly in any post-conviction proceeding on whether to impose the death penalty-because jurors might be influenced by McVeigh’s "scripted production" to regard him as the less culpable of the two.

But Tigar’s point was to urge that Nichols be tried separately-not that McVeigh be gagged-and he recognized that McVeigh "has a constitutional right to say his piece."

McVeigh’s also has a right to insist on any conditions he wants before agreeing to an interview; to orchestrate a competition among networks eager for a journalistic coup to boost their ratings during the November sweeps periods; and to choose the most complaint of the many journalists who have bedieged him with requests.

But the media have no obligation to agree to any conditions. Indeed, they have an ethical duty to spurn any that would mislead their viewers or readers, or limit their editorial discretion.

Of course, journalists routinely agree to various conditions to get cooperation from subjects of or sources for their stories-restrictions on how sensitive information can be attributed, on asking questions during presidential photo-opportunities andother picture-taking sessions, and the like. There would be nothing wrong with agreeing to reasonable conditions insisted upon by McVeigh. But what sorts of conditions would be reasonable?

This is not such a hard line to draw. The conditions that McVeigh has imposed in a few previous media interviews, for example-barring any questions about facts relevant to his case and any relevant to his case and any pictures that show his handcuffs-seem reasonable enough. He has a constitutional right not to answer questions about the facts before or during the trial, and a tactical interest in keeping the prosecution from finding out in advance what he might say in any testimony. He also has a legitimate interest in refusing to be filmed in shackles or while being pressed with questions he is unwilling to answer, which might convey an image of danger and guilt.

But any journalists who obtain interviews with McVeigh’s should fully disclose any such conditions to their viewers or readers. And if McVeigh seeks explicit or implicit agreements limiting what would be interviewers can say about him or his case immediately before or after any interview or photo session, no self-respecting journalist should agree. That is a matter of editorial discretion and integrity.

We may soon find out how much integrity the networks and others have exercised in their efforts to boost their ratings by making deals with this accused mass murderer who wants to look like a Boy Scout.