The Times, They AREN'T A' Changin'

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published an editorial that took the NYT to task about its article revealing the existence of the SWIFT terrorist financial tracking program, and offered explanation and insight as to why the WSJ also published a story on the classified program. There are many revelations in “Fit and Unfit to Print, What are the obligations of the press in wartime?”, not the least of which was that Congressman Jack Murtha was one of the individuals that urged the NYT not to go to press with the SWIFT article. Further:

Sometime later, Secretary John Snow invited Times Executive Editor Bill Keller to his Treasury office to deliver the same message. Later still, Mr. Fratto says, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, the leaders of the 9/11 Commission, made the same request of Mr. Keller. Democratic Congressman John Murtha and Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte also urged the newspaper not to publish the story.

The Times decided to publish anyway, letting Mr. Fratto know about its decision a week ago Wednesday. The Times agreed to delay publishing by a day to give Mr. Fratto a chance to bring the appropriate Treasury official home from overseas. Based on his own discussions with Times reporters and editors, Mr. Fratto says he believed "they had about 80% of the story, but they had about 30% of it wrong." So the Administration decided that, in the interest of telling a more complete and accurate story, they would declassify a series of talking points about the program. They discussed those with the Times the next day, June 22.

Around the same time, Treasury contacted Journal reporter Glenn Simpson to offer him the same declassified information. Mr. Simpson has been working the terror finance beat for some time, including asking questions about the operations of Swift, and it is a common practice in Washington for government officials to disclose a story that is going to become public anyway to more than one reporter. Our guess is that Treasury also felt Mr. Simpson would write a straighter story than the Times, which was pushing a violation-of-privacy angle; on our reading of the two June 23 stories, he did.

Thus the editorial side of the WSJ rationalizes the news side's decision to print the article in question. The two sides of the paper are separate and distinct, with different editors. The “news” side hasn’t commented, as far as I know. At any rate, the justification to print and the chronology of events are just the opening shots of this editorial. The WSJ goes on to say…

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.

Recommended.

The NYT and the LA Times felt obliged to respond to the WSJ. Their response came today in the form of a joint editorial published in both papers. The editorial is here, and doesn’t convince me in the least about both papers’ editorial wisdom in deciding to publish the offending article. The editorial begins with an extended, de rigeur reference to the Viet Nam era, quotes Justice Hugo Black on the subject, and then goes on to discuss the process the papers (I use the plural because it is a joint editorial) use to develop and publish such stories. To wit:

Thirty-five years ago yesterday, in the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote: "The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people."

[…]

The process begins with reporting. Sensitive stories do not fall into our hands. They may begin with a tip from a source who has a grievance or a guilty conscience, but those tips are just the beginning of long, painstaking work. Reporters operate without security clearances, without subpoena powers, without spy technology. They work, rather, with sources who may be scared, who may know only part of the story, who may have their own agendas that need to be discovered and taken into account. We double-check and triple-check. We seek out sources with different points of view. We challenge our sources when contradictory information emerges.

Then we listen. No article on a classified program gets published until the responsible officials have been given a fair opportunity to comment. And if they want to argue that publication represents a danger to national security, we put things on hold and give them a respectful hearing. Often, we agree to participate in off-the-record conversations with officials, so they can make their case without fear of spilling more secrets onto our front pages.

Finally, we weigh the merits of publishing against the risks of publishing. There is no magic formula, no neat metric for either the public's interest or the dangers of publishing sensitive information. We make our best judgment.

I remain unconvinced. As a matter of fact, I’m much less convinced now about the Times “good intentions” than I was before I read the editorial. All I read indicates the Times is digging in its heels and intends to continue doing as it has been doing. As far as being unconvinced goes, I’m not alone. According to Fox News, 60% of Americans think the NYT aided the enemy by publishing the SWIFT story.

And finally…Gerard posits an interesting theory as to why the Times, more specifically Bill Keller and “Pinch” Sulzberger, the Times’ editor and publisher, are acting the way they are. They’re a couple of perverts. And Gerard backs it up, convincingly.

I know less about Keller, the more mannish of the two, than I do about Pinch. Indeed I know only what I read into Keller's mind and motives from his own mewling and damp "Letter" published last week in the paper. In it Keller is given to "justifying" his latest insult against the Republic that has given him stature, insulation and millions. In a way, seeing how he compulsively betrays the nation, that letter alone is enough to get the small measure of this man, and his "boss," and the entire "smart set" in which they circulate.

For both of them, their behavior is enough to illuminate the dark perversion of the soul that overtook many who came of age in the era of VietWaterNamGate. If there is an aspect of tragedy in their preening it is only that many have lived long enough to rise to positions of unelected power in the media establishment so that their particular perversion of intellect and morality now have the power to stain the soul and honor of the nation itself. But this is as far beyond their comprehension as the very notion of "a nation." For once you are in the bubble of private jets, the nation seems very far below and very faint. After all, in the one world to come there will be, we are assured, no borders or boundaries at all.

The various elements that make up the perversion that drives men like Keller and boys like Pinch are too well known to dwell on at length here. In the most general terms the perversion presents as an emptiness of soul, an abiding cynicism about the good that lies at the foundation of the nation, a smug waft of amoral sanctimony, an obsessive concern with the primping and feathering of the body, an immense self-regard for one's privileged set that justifies the notion that a few men can know better than a majority of citizens what is good for all, and a kind of intellectual pouting that is unremitting when the majority ceases to respect, patronize, and admire the trappings and outer glitter of the perversion.

Ooooh, Gerard is SO good. I’m a believer.