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Sometimes the judgments are easy. Our reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, take great care not to divulge operational intelligence in their news reports. Especially the ones that are working with insurgents, like Bilal Hussein. No way we'd ever reveal his contacts or al Qaeda's secrets!
Often the judgments are painfully hard. Just kidding. It's pretty easy. If we believe the secrets we reveal will hurt Bushitler and co., then we reveal them. If they will help, we don't. In case of a tie--one thinking it will help Bush, the other thinking it will hurt--we do rock paper scissors.
The process begins with reporting by reporters who report. 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. The kind of work only reporters can do. It's a Herculean task, really. One best left to the professionals. Like us.
Reporters operate without security clearances, without subpoena powers, without spy technology. Isn't that tragic? I mean, why should the government have a monopoly on subpoena powers & security clearances? Jefferson would be rolling over in his grave right now. And don't even get us started about all that cool spy shit the government lords over us like they were all that! Fascists. Reporters are forced to work with sources who may be scared of their own government because we all know they will hunt you down and kill you, who usually know only part of the story, who may have their own agendas that sometimes coincide with our own. We double-check and triple-check. Hell, one of us once ran four whole Google searches using three different Boolean strings to make sure our sources were legit. We seek out sources with different points of view, and then find ways to discredit them. We challenge our sources when contradictory information emerges the way a defense lawyer sometimes preps a client.
Then we listen. Just kidding. We threw in that short declarative sentence to make it seem like we care. We don't. It's something we learned from Bill Clinton. Man, those were the days! Weren't they? 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 hearing in which we try not to giggle too much. 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.
See, how fair and open we are? It's due process at it's finest!
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. Trust us. Really. We are that wise. We are Prometheus stealing the fire from those bitches in government up there on Mt. Olympus who want to keep it secret from America.
Who the hell are the CIA, FBI, or the Treasury Dept. to keep secrets from us, their betters in the media?
When we come down in favor of publishing, of course, everyone hears about it. Which is a kind of moronic statement to throw in here but Keller insisted that we put it in. You're stupid, but not that stupid. Few people are aware when we decide to hold an article. But each of us, in the past few years, has had the experience of withholding or delaying articles when when we thought it might not help the Democratic party. Probably the most discussed instance was The New York Times's decision to hold its article on telephone eavesdropping for more than a year, until editors felt that the approval ratings on the war were low enough that people wouldn't be too pissed about us releasing information that might get them killed. Jesus, we're we wrong on that! I mean, have you seen those numbers lately? They just keep getting lower and lower. It seems our plans to demoralize the American people about the war were even better than we thought.
But there are other examples. The New York Times has held articles that, if published, might have jeopardized efforts to protect vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear material, and articles about highly sensitive counterterrorism initiatives that are still in operation. No really. Trust us on this one. This is another one of those differences. Trust us vs. 'trust us'. Never trust the government when they say 'trust us', but trust us when we say trust us because you can trust us because we're the media. In April, The Los Angeles Times withheld information about American espionage and surveillance activities in Afghanistan discovered on computer drives purchased by reporters in an Afghan bazaar. We didn't want to, but some SOB in the military threatened us with bodily harm if we put his men in jeopardy. Fascist.
It is not always a matter of publishing an article or killing it. Sometimes we deal with the security concerns by editing out gratuitous detail that lends little to public understanding but might be useful to the targets of surveillance. We're going to throw in another example here from a third-party that has nothing to do with this editorial so that it will seem that we're more responsible now. The Washington Post, at the administration's request, agreed not to name the specific countries that had secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons, deeming that information not essential for American readers. Fools! We would have done it in a heart-beat, but we're throwing that example in here to make us seem more responsible than we really are by association. The New York Times, in its article on National Security Agency eavesdropping, left out some technical details. We really don't understand that technical shit anyway.
Even the banking articles, which the president and vice president have condemned, did not dwell on the operational or technical aspects of the program, but on its sweep, the questions about its legal basis and the issues of oversight. Of course, no one really questions its legality. But by questioning its legality we really do raise interesting questions, don't we? And aren't the questions what are really important?
We understand that honorable people may disagree with any of these choices — to publish or not to publish. But making those decisions is the responsibility that falls to editors, a corollary to the great gift of our independence. Don't you people get it? We are the media. The shiznit. We pimps, you bitches. We pitcher, you catcher. We do not make mistakes. No higher authority exists. It is not a responsibility we take lightly. And it is not one we can surrender to the government.
— DEAN BAQUET, editor, The Los Angeles Times, and BILL KELLER, executive editor, The New York Times did not write this story.
