Debates rage inside a newsroom about every sensitive story. There’s nothing more sobering than when the debate goes beyond a story’s accuracy and fairness, when it goes to a larger question: Will publishing this story cause more harm than good to the nation?
President Bush on Monday condemned the recent disclosure of a secret government program by several newspapers, saying that the reporting had damaged national security.
The program in question monitors the financial transactions of suspected terrorists, allowing U.S. counterterrorism analysts to obtain financial information from a vast database.
Bush said the disclosure of that program was “disgraceful.” He said the revelation “does great harm to the United States” and “makes it harder to win this war on terror.” The contention is that terrorists will hide their tracks if they know some of the “means and methods” the U.S. and its allies use to track them.
Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) urged the Bush administration to prosecute The New York Times for the disclosure. “We’re at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous,” he said.
Those are grave charges.
A lot of Americans may ask why the Times, and other papers, including the Chicago Tribune, published this information.
The government has a right, even a duty, to keep some secrets. No responsible news organization would argue otherwise or knowingly divulge secrets that endangered lives.
But the government and the press often find themselves on a collision course about which secrets are important to protect and which are important for the public to know. As Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, wrote Sunday in a letter to readers: “The question we start with as journalists is not `why publish?’ but `why would we withhold information of significance?’ We have sometimes done so, holding stories or editing out details that could serve those hostile to the U.S. But we need a compelling reason to do so.”
There’s a long and testy history of newspapers and government officials, even presidents, wrangling over the publication of things that journalists learned despite the government’s efforts to keep them at arm’s length.
In 1942, a livid President Franklin Roosevelt briefly contemplated sending Marines to occupy Tribune Tower because of a report in this newspaper that naval officials feared would tip the Japanese that the U.S. had broken their military code. An investigation later cleared the Tribune and two of its staffers of violating an espionage law. In the Watergate era, the government went to court to stop newspapers from publishing the Pentagon Papers, which were highly illuminating about the conduct of the Vietnam war. That effort to stop publication failed–and the public was well-served by the information it learned.
A key mission of the press is to inform citizens about the workings of their government. That’s an especially crucial function at a time when Americans are caught up in a wartime debate about how to balance our government’s duty to protect us and our desire to keep its nose out of our business. The overwhelming belief here is that the greater good is served when there’s a free flow of information so that people can make their own decisions about their government.
