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Herewith follows the cannonade across the bow of the ethically-challenged about-to-be-investigated ueber-rag New York Times taking the insufferable broadsheet to task for its shoddy journalistic practices. The text is from Michelle Malkin's quoting of in-house ombudsperson Byron Calame's complaints. Not to worry, a Special Prosecutor is bound to get to the bottom of this flagrant illegal-leaking cum book-publishing scam that hopefully will get bantamweight Pinch Sulzberger out of the Publisher's Chair and into the seats of his collection of Harleys FULL-TIME.
The New York Times's explanation of its decision to report, after what it said was a one-year delay, that the National Security Agency is eavesdropping domestically without court-approved warrants was woefully inadequate. And I have had unusual difficulty getting a better explanation for readers, despite the paper's repeated pledges of greater transparency.
For the first time since I became public editor, the executive editor and the publisher have declined to respond to my requests for information about news-related decision-making. My queries concerned the timing of the exclusive Dec. 16 article about President Bush's secret decision in the months after 9/11 to authorize the warrantless eavesdropping on Americans in the United States.
I e-mailed a list of 28 questions to Bill Keller, the executive editor, on Dec. 19, three days after the article appeared. He promptly declined to respond to them. I then sent the same questions to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, who also declined to respond. They held out no hope for a fuller explanation in the future...
...On the larger question of why the eavesdropping article finally appeared when it did, a couple of possibilities intrigue me.
One is that Times editors said they discovered there was more concern inside the government about the eavesdropping than they had initially been told. Mr. Keller's prepared statements said that "a year ago," officials "assured senior editors of The Times that a variety of legal checks had been imposed that satisfied everyone involved that the program raised no legal questions." So the paper "agreed not to publish at that time" and continued reporting.
But in the months that followed, Mr. Keller said, "we developed a fuller picture of the concerns and misgivings that had been expressed during the life of the program" and "it became clear those questions loomed larger within the government than we had previously understood."
The impact of a new book about intelligence by Mr. Risen on the timing of the article is difficult to gauge. The book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," was not mentioned in the Dec. 16 article. Mr. Keller asserted in the shorter of his two statements that the article wasn't timed to the forthcoming book, and that "its origins and publication are completely independent of Jim's book."
The publication of Mr. Risen's book, with its discussion of the eavesdropping operation, was scheduled for mid-January - but has now been moved up to Tuesday. Despite Mr. Keller's distancing of The Times from "State of War," Mr. Risen's publisher told me on Dec. 21 that the paper's Washington bureau chief had talked to her twice in the previous 30 days about the book.
So it seems to me the paper was quite aware that it faced the possibility of being scooped by its own reporter's book in about four weeks. But the key question remains: To what extent did the book cause top editors to shrug off the concerns that had kept them from publishing the eavesdropping article for months?
A final note: If Mr. Risen's book or anything else of substance should open any cracks in the stone wall surrounding the handling of the eavesdropping article, I will have my list of 28 questions (35 now, actually) ready to e-mail again to Mr. Keller...
Michelle quite sensibly asks for transparency from Calame about the questions he posed to the cover-up crew running the NYT. Some grist for the Special Prosecutor.
There are questions all over the lot. Buzz Machine asks very sensibly why after several hardball pitches,
What Calame does not address is the timing of the eventual release of the story just as Congress debated the extension of the Patriot Act.
And Jeff Jarvis goes on to quote Instapundit thusly:
The Times’ behavior on this story, and the Plame story, has undermined the unwritten “National Security Constitution” regarding leaks and classified information. Since the Pentagon Papers, at least, the rule has been that papers could publish classified information in a whistleblowing mode, but that they would be sensitive to national security concerns. In return, the federal government would tread lightly in investigating where the leaks came from. But the politicization of the coverage, and the outright partisanship of the Times, has put paid to that arrangement. It’s not clear to me that the country is better served by the new arrangement, but unwritten constitutions require a lot of self-discipline on the part of the various players, and that sort of discipline is no longer to be found in America’s leadership circles.
If the Times decided that its job was to tell its readers everything it knew, when it knew it, then it would have a good argument for publishing this sort of thing. But since the Times has made clear that it’s happy to keep its readers in the dark when doing so serves its institutional interests, it doesn’t have that defense for publishing stuff that’s bad for national security.
When does the public's need to know surpass the need for public safety? All the time, according to the Fifth Column at the NYT.
The NYU Journalism Guru Jay Rosen has a terrific overview of the issues of transparency, accountability, and the entire lamentable ethos of the New York Times, which has transgressed the boundary between observation of politics and wandered way into the role of participant in political adversarial opposition.
I'm waiting for Richard A. Posner to come out and explain again to Bill Keller and Pincheroo just how money-grubbing big-time journalism has become. I'll try to go back and find Judge Posner's letter to the editor that had Keller and his posse of liberal sidekicks with steam coming out of their ears.
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