All Hands on Deck to Bail Out the Times
Posted by: Clay Waters
7/5/2006 8:19:11 PM
While many people used the fortuitously timed Independence Day to construct a four-day weekend, it was all hands on deck on West 43rd Street in Manhattan in defense of the Times' international banking spy scoop, which has probably harmed, if not completely scuttled, that successful anti-terror program. 
Barney Calame, the paper's public editor (and corporate yes-man) is easily convinced by boss Bill Keller, while op-ed columnist Frank Rich devotes his usual gargantuan Sunday column to conservative outrage against the Times, which of course he finds hypocritical and disturbing.
Calame does note his mail is clearly running against the Times. "Roughly 1,000 e-mails have come to me, about 85 percent of them critical of the decision to publish story and a large fraction venomous." Boo-hoo.
“My close look convinced me that Bill Keller, the executive editor, was correct in deciding that Times readers deserved to read about the banking-data surveillance program. And the growing indications that this and other financial monitoring operations were hardly a secret to the terrorist world minimizes the possibility that the article made America less safe….There was a significant question as to how secret the program was after five years.”
Tell that to the story’s reporter, Eric Lichtblau, who went on CNN’s Reliable Sources Sunday and declared anti-terrorist surveillance of banking programs was "by no means a secret."
Op-ed columnist/editor Frank Rich has his usual bombastic take: "No sooner were the flag burners hustled offstage than a new traitor was unveiled for the Fourth: the press. Public enemy No. 1 is The New York Times, which was accused of a 'disgraceful' compromise of national security (by President Bush) and treason (by Representative Peter King of New York and the Coulter amen chorus)....It was a solid piece of journalism. But if you want to learn the truly dirty secrets of how our government prosecutes this war, the story of how it vilified The Times is more damning than anything in the article that caused the uproar….The assault on a free press during our own wartime should be recognized for what it is: another desperate ploy by officials trying to hide their own lethal mistakes in the shadows. It's the antithesis of everything we celebrate with the blazing lights of Independence Day."
And liberal columnist Nicolas Kristof marks July 4 with a declaration of journalistic independence (as opposed to those propagandists at Fox News).
Kristof's "Don't Turn Us Into Poodles' does take a more nuanced approach than Rich, but falls victim to the same First Amendment fetishizing. Though Kristof admits he may not have run the bank spy article, he still defends his paper's decision and swipes at Fox News, comparing the network to state-controlled Communist media.
"The more recent disclosure about bank transfers seems to me a harder call. The program seems both legal and sensible, and it would be a setback in the unlikely event that bankers backed off in the glare of publicity.
"So, I might have made that decision differently. But so far there is no evidence that the banking story harmed national security, and I'm sure that editors of this newspaper, The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal weighed their responsibilities seriously, for they have repeatedly held back information when necessary. In contrast, the press-bashers have much less credibility."
Later Kristof makes a silly assertion, implying that demanding some restraint on the part of the Times before it prints classified information is akin to totalitarian control of the press.
"More broadly, the one thing worse than a press that is 'out of control' is one that is under control. Anybody who has lived in a Communist country knows that. Just consider what would happen if the news media as a whole were as docile to the administration as Fox News or The Wall Street Journal editorial page. When I was covering the war in Iraq, we reporters would sometimes tune to Fox News and watch, mystified, as it purported to describe how Iraqis loved Americans. Such coverage (backed by delusional Journal editorials baffling to anyone who was actually in Iraq) misled conservatives about Iraq from the beginning. In retrospect, the real victims of Fox News weren't the liberals it attacked but the conservatives who believed it."
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