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| Fit and Unfit to Print -- What are the obligations of the press in wartime? |
| 2006-06-30 |
| "Not everything is fit to print. There is to be regard for at least probable factual accuracy, for danger to innocent lives, for human decencies, and even, if cautiously, for nonpartisan considerations of the national interest." So wrote the great legal scholar, Alexander Bickel, about the duties of the press in his 1975 collection of essays "The Morality of Consent." We like to re-read Bickel to get our Constitutional bearings, and he's been especially useful since the New York Times decided last week to expose a major weapon in the U.S. arsenal against terror financing. President Bush, among others, has since assailed the press for revealing the program, and the Times has responded by wrapping itself in the First Amendment, the public's right to know and even The Wall Street Journal. We published a story on the same subject on the same day, and the Times has since claimed us as its ideological wingman. So allow us to explain what actually happened, putting this episode within the larger context of a newspaper's obligations during wartime. . . . Short summary: once the government knew that the NYT would be publishing the story, it declassified some "talking points" and gave those to the WSJ in order to combat some inaccuracies in the NYT story. Which brings us back to the New York Times. We suspect that the Times has tried to use the Journal as its political heatshield precisely because it knows our editors have more credibility on these matters. As Alexander Bickel wrote, the relationship between government and the press in the free society is an inevitable and essential contest. The government needs a certain amount of secrecy to function, especially on national security, and the press in its watchdog role tries to discover what it can. The government can't expect total secrecy, Bickel writes, "but the game similarly calls on the press to consider the responsibilities that its position implies. Not everything is fit to print." The obligation of the press is to take the government seriously when it makes a request not to publish. Is the motive mainly political? How important are the national security concerns? And how do those concerns balance against the public's right to know? The problem with the Times is that millions of Americans no longer believe that its editors would make those calculations in anything close to good faith. We certainly don't. On issue after issue, it has become clear that the Times believes the U.S. is not really at war, and in any case the Bush Administration lacks the legitimacy to wage it. So, for example, it promulgates a double standard on "leaks," deploring them in the case of Valerie Plame and demanding a special counsel when the leaker was presumably someone in the White House and the journalist a conservative columnist. But then it hails as heroic and public-spirited the leak to the Times itself that revealed the National Security Agency's al Qaeda wiretaps. Mr. Keller's open letter explaining his decision to expose the Treasury program all but admits that he did so because he doesn't agree with, or believe, the Bush Administration. "Since September 11, 2001, our government has launched broad and secret anti-terror monitoring programs without seeking authorizing legislation and without fully briefing the Congress," he writes, and "some officials who have been involved in these programs have spoken to the Times about their discomfort over the legality of the government's actions and over the adequacy of oversight." Since the Treasury story broke, as it happens, no one but Congressman Ed Markey and a few cranks have even objected to the program, much less claimed illegality. Perhaps Mr. Keller has been listening to his boss, Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who in a recent commencement address apologized to the graduates because his generation "had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government. "Our children, we vowed, would never know that. So, well, sorry. It wasn't supposed to be this way," the publisher continued. "You weren't supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land. You weren't supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights," and so on. Forgive us if we conclude that a newspaper led by someone who speaks this way to college seniors has as a major goal not winning the war on terror but obstructing it. In all of this, Mr. Sulzberger and the Times are reminiscent of a publisher from an earlier era, Colonel Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. In the 1930s and into World War II, the Tribune was implacable in its opposition to FDR and his conduct of the war. During the war itself, his newspaper also exposed secrets, including one story after the victory at Midway in 1942 that essentially disclosed that the U.S. had broken Japanese codes. The government considered, but decided against, prosecuting McCormick's paper under the Espionage Act of 1917. That was a wise decision, and not only because it would have drawn more attention to the Tribune "scoop." IIRC, one reason why the government declined to prosecute the Tribune was that it was the only paper that ran the story--and in those pre-Internet days, the meme could not so easily spread. The Japanese continued using the same basic code system (the JN-25 series), indicating that they hadn't picked up on the story. Had the Tribune been prosecuted, there would have been more news articles on the subject, essentially insuring the Japanese would get the news about the codebreakers. Once a government starts indicting reporters for publishing stories, there will be no drawing any lines against such prosecutions, and we will be well down the road to an Official Secrets Act that will let government dictate coverage. The current political clamor is nonetheless a warning to the press about the path the Times is walking. Already, its partisan demand for a special counsel in the Plame case has led to a reporter going to jail and to defeats in court over protecting sources. Now the politicians are talking about Espionage Act prosecutions. All of which is cause for the rest of us in the media to recognize, heeding Alexander Bickel, that sometimes all the news is not fit to print. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #3 Just use the method that MSM has pushed for years to punish 'businessmen' and 'corporations' who abuse the people, make them more vulnerable to torte. If there is a successful terrorist attack in the future, make the offending element of MSM subject to the general standard like asbestos manufacturers. There are numerous cases where no direct link and even no current cancer exists, but courts have found manufactures libel for big damages. Time to remove the MSM elite standards they believe they are entitled to. Level the playing field. WhatÂ’s go for any other business as far as standards of proof in civil damages trials should be the same for MSM. LetÂ’s play the MSM game of hitting them hard in the pocket. |
| Posted by: Spomble Phinerong1942 2006-06-30 09:12 |
| #2 There was also a Congressman in WWII who announced to the press that our submarines were safe from attack because the Japanese depth charges were exploding at the wrong depth. Adm. Lockwood later told Adm. King that the Congressman should be pleased to hear that the Japanese were no longer having that problem. Neither Congressman nor reporting paper, also the Tribune, I think, were prosecuted. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-06-30 07:59 |
| #1 The Japanese continued using the same basic code system (the JN-25 series), indicating that they hadn't picked up on the story. Had the Tribune been prosecuted, there would have been more news articles on the subject, essentially insuring the Japanese would get the news about the codebreakers. That's true, but only from our side of the story. The Japanese DID see the Tribune story, but their cryptographers told the high command that JN25 was absolutely unbreakable and that this had to be some fiendish American propaganda trick - after all, they believed that we had suffered almost as badly at Midway as they had. Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2006-06-30 07:33 |