Journalists should be in the business of providing timely information
to the public. But some -- notably at the top rungs of the profession
-- have become players in the power games of the nation’s capital.
And more than a few seem glad to imitate the officeholders who want
to decide what the public shouldn’t know.
When the New York Times front page broke the story of the National
Security Agency’s domestic spying, the newspaper’s editors had good
reason to feel proud. Or so it seemed. But there was a troubling
backstory: The Times had kept the scoop under wraps for a long time.
The White House did what it could -- including, as a last-ditch move,
an early December presidential meeting that brought Times publisher
Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office
-- in its efforts to persuade the Times not to report the story. The
good news is that those efforts ultimately failed. The bad news is
that they were successful for more than a year.
“The decision to hold the story last year was mine,” Keller said,
according to a Washington Post article that appeared 10 days after
the Times’ blockbuster Dec. 16 story. He added: “The decision to run
the story last week was mine. I’m comfortable with both decisions.
Beyond that, there's just no way to have a full discussion of the
internal procedural twists that media writers find so fascinating
without talking about what we knew, when, and how -- and that I can’t
do.”
From all indications, the Times had the basic story in hand before
the election in November 2004, when Bush defeated challenger John
Kerry. In other words, if those running the New York Times had
behaved like journalists instead of political players -- if they had
exposed this momentous secret instead of keeping it -- there are good
reasons to believe the outcome of the presidential election might
have been different.
Chiseled into the stone facades of some courthouses is the credo
“Justice delayed is justice denied.” The same might be said of
journalism, which derives much of its power from timeliness. When
egregiously delayed, journalism is denied -- or at least severely
diminished.
Yet quite a few prominent journalists have expressed a strange kind
of media solidarity with the Times delay of the NSA story for so
long.
Consider how the Washington Post intelligence reporter Dana Priest,
for instance, responded to a request for “your opinion on the NY
Times holding the domestic spying story for a year,” during a Dec. 22
online chat. “Well, first: I don't have a clue why they did so,”
Priest replied. “But I would give them the benefit of the doubt that
it was for a good reason and, as their story said, they do more
reporting within that year to satisfy themselves about certain
things. Having read the story and the follow-ups, it’s unclear why
this would damage a valuable capability. Again, if the government
doesn't think the bad guys believe their phones are tapped, they
underestimate the enemy!”
Also opting to “give them the benefit of the doubt,” some usually
insightful media critics have gone out of their way to voice support
for the Times news management.
Deferring to the judgment of the executive editor of the New York
Times may be akin to deferring to the judgment of the chief executive
of the United States government. And as it happens, in this case, the
avowed foreign policy goals of each do not appear to be in
fundamental conflict -- on the meaning of the Iraq war or the wisdom
of enshrining a warfare state. Pretenses aside, the operative
judgments from the New York Times executive editor go way beyond the
purely journalistic.
“So far, the passion to investigate the integrity of American
intelligence-gathering belongs mostly to the doves, whose motives are
subject to suspicion and who, in any case, do not set the agenda,”
Bill Keller wrote in an essay that appeared in the Times on June 14,
2003, shortly before he became executive editor. And Keller
concluded: “The truth is that the information-gathering machine
designed to guide our leaders in matters of war and peace shows signs
of being corrupted. To my mind, this is a worrisome problem, but not
because it invalidates the war we won. It is a problem because it
weakens us for the wars we still face.”
(By the way, Keller’s phrase “the war we won” referred to the Iraq war.)
The story of the NSA’s illicit domestic spying is not over. More
holes are appearing in the Bush administration’s damage-control
claims. Media critics who affirm how important the story is -- but
make excuses for the long delay in breaking it -- are part of a
rationalizing process that has no end.
“The domestic spying controversy is a story of immense importance,”
Sydney Schanberg writes in the current Village Voice. The long delay
before the Times published this “story of immense importance” does
not seem to bother him much. “The paper had held the story for a year
at the administration’s pleading but decided, after second thoughts
and more reporting, that its importance required publication.” Such
wording should look at least a bit weird to journalistic eyes, but
Schanberg doesn’t muster any criticism, merely commenting: “From
where I stand (I’m a Times alumnus), the paper should get credit for
digging it out and publishing it.”
Professional loyalties can’t explain the extent of such uncritical
media criticism from journalists. Many, like Schanberg, want to
concentrate on the villainy of the Bush administration -- as if it
hasn’t been aided and abetted by the New York Times’ delay. Leading
off his Dec. 24 column with a blast at George W. Bush for “asserting
the divine right of presidents,” the Los Angeles Times media critic
Tim Rutten proceeded with an essay that came close to asserting the
divine right of executive editors to hold back vital stories for a
very long time. Dismissing substantive criticism as the work of
“paranoids,” Rutten gave only laurels to the sovereign: “The New York
Times deserves thanks and admiration for the service it has done the
nation.”
A cogent rebuttal to such testimonials came on Dec. 26 from Miami
Herald columnist Edward Wasserman, who wrote: “One of the more
durable fallacies of ethical thought in journalism is the notion that
doing right means holding back, that wrong is averted by leaving
things out, reporting less or reporting nothing. When in doubt, kill
the quote, hold the story -- that’s the ethical choice. But silence
isn't innocent. It has consequences. In this case, it protected those
within the government who believe that the law is a nuisance, that
they don't have to play by the rules, by any rules, even their own.”
While many journalists seem eager to downplay the importance of the
Times’ refusal to publish what it knew without long delay, Wasserman
offers clarity: “Didn’t the delay do harm? We know that thousands of
people were subject to governmental intrusion that officials thought
couldn’t be justified even under a highly permissive set of laws. We
also know that because knowledge of this illegality was kept confined
to a small circle of initiates, the political system’s response was
postponed more than a year, and its ability to correct a serious
abuse of power was thwarted. I don’t know what the Times’ brass was
thinking. Maybe they just lost their nerve. Maybe they didn’t want to
tangle with a fiercely combative White House right before an
election. But I do believe that withholding accurate information of
great public importance is the most serious action any news
organization can take. The reproach -- ‘You knew and you didn't tell
us?’ -- reflects a fundamental professional betrayal.”
Perhaps in 2007 we will learn that the New York Times had an
explosive story about other ongoing government violations of civil
liberties or some other crucial issue, but held it until after the
November 2006 congressional elections. In that case, quite a few
media critics and other journalists could recycle their pieces about
giving the Times the benefit of the doubt and appreciating the
quality of the crucial story that finally appeared.
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Norman Solomon’s latest book is “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits
Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For information, go to:
www.WarMadeEasy.com