In old headline speak….
June 26, 2006 - 10:31 am
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Barone’s article is provocative but to answer his query; there are three reasons the Times publishes.
1.) The Times hates Bush.
2.) The Times’ midtown arrogance is tied to the freedom of the press; it truly believes it has a moral obligation to uphold that constitutional principle.
3.) The Times views itself as the paper of record in the United States, the embodiment of the Fourth Estate and Little Sulzberger sees himself as carrying on the grand tradition of liberal journalism in the United States.
Mix these together, try and sort them out; you come up with a messianic complex which ignores and rejects the understandable demands by the administration.
‘New York Times editor Bill Keller said that he and his staff concluded after a “long and vigorous debate” that publishing the cartoon would be “perceived as a particularly deliberate insult” by Muslims. “Like any decision to withhold elements of a story, this was neither easy nor entirely satisfying, but it feels like the right thing to do.”
put your freedom of speech in your pipe and smoke it.
f
Just had too say, excellent point feaster. Bill is all for freedom of speech, as long as he is the one to control it.
The counterargument is that it is a dangerous business for the government to prosecute the press. But it certainly is in order to prosecute government officials who have abused their trust by disclosing secrets, especially when those disclosures have reduced the government’s ability to keep us safe. And pursuit of those charges would probably require reporters to disclose the names of those sources. As the Times found out in the Judith Miller case, reporters who refuse to answer such questions can go to jail.
I think this is probably the most useful statement made in regard to this entire scenario. The press has no obligation, other than to report what will make money for the company. If you believe that the press has any other ‘first motive’ then I feel sorry for you. However, government employees and elected officials usually have to agree to various privacy controls when getting access to secret information. If that secret information is that we’re running death camps or that Americans are being ‘disappeared’ for not supporting Bush… then they should go to reporters. However, prosecuting the idiots who simply want to publicize anything that will look like bad PR for Bush, sounds like a great idea to me.
Now, that being said, I think that the administration (and the article) are laying things on a bit think. People who wish to do the US harm already assume that the US is watching phone calls and bank transactions. At best, they’re hoping to slip through the net because of the sheer volume of data. We are not LESS SAFE because of the NYT. However, we may be less safe because of government officials/employees that allow personal politics to override their duty.
I agree. The administration should identify a
few governmental employees and go after them by bringing charges. There was that CIA woman
but there are more. Find them out by issuing subpoenas for the press by making them feel
“the chilling effect” of a grand jury subpoena. Their papers will pay for the lawyers and the government leakers have only their retirement.
I agree with you, the administration is laying it on, as they should.
What Ahmed does not know not to call the US or avoid the big banks. One which the authorities are not that interested in, to be sure.
The administration cannot touch them, period. At least that’s what they (the two TIMERS) FEEL.
Just imagine the headline: Government Controlled Media (as to what they can and can not say).
Having grew up in a country that had total government controlled media, people in the West who cry “govenrment controlled media” have absolutely no idea what the words mean. You can not even imagine it.
Did somebody else find the timeline interesting, too?
The program was implemented shortly after Sept, 2001 till now, with success. A few in the Congress selected committee members were briefed on the program and its progress.
After the admin expand the briefing to include more in the Congress, then shortly after, we have this leak to the NYT.
What does this mean? Here we have a leaker (or leakers) who may not be a “disgruntled ex-employee”.
Screw the Times. Basically, the NYT’s is a provincial paper catering to the moneyed leftist glitterati on the Upper West Side, the same fossilized radical chic mau mau’ers that Tom Wolf scathingly wrote about ages ago:
http://www.tomwolfe.com/RadicalChic.html
If you took away the advertising of the rich leftist’s consumer goods from the Times, it would fold tomorrow.
It’s a loathsome paper, arrogant and anti-American to the core.
“Paper of record’ was a nice concept before the internet, citizen journalists, and our own responsibilty with these new tools to seek truth.
Damn good letter by Snow. Can’t wait for Keller’s rebuttal. Yeah, right.
Roger:
Keller exposed the exact methods that was being used to track the financing of the terrorists. He can’t get around the fact that his paper directly aided our enemies. The arrogance of”oh, we know that they know everything anyway” is so bogus but Keller should have to provide his facts that they knew everything that he told them. The Mafia knew that the feds were tracking them but I doubt that the Times would tell them who the snitch’s were and what Banks were giving the governmnment info. In their hatred of President Bush they have possibly given a potential terrorist the heads up on where not to route their cash and they have risked the lives of our countrymen for the sake of a scoop. Not every terrorist group or the thugs that fund them would know all the methods being used and the NYT has helped them not to make the dumb mistake that has been at the heart of some of the succesful operations that have saved peoples lives. This was a legal operation, the Congress had been informed, the NYT can’t even point to any abuse that the program had committed yet they exposed it anyway. Keller will have to answer someday for the lives that he has put at risk. He should be ashamed and the NYT has declared themselves a neutral in the fight against Islamo Fascism. Shame, shame, shame.
I feel that I have the RIGHT to see a photo of this Bill Keller, and also his address, and also his latest Income Tax Return. It is in the public interest that this information be made public because I feel uncomfortable if it is NOT openly in the public arena.
And if I feel uncomfortable, gosh darn it, the World Must Listen and ACT.
Therefore, I expect to see the LA Times, the NYT and the WSJ to publish the portraits of each and every reporter responsible for this story, PLUS all their personal (so-called) information.
OK??
Heather is on to something. Perhaps lots of blogs could publish all this information.
Say… his home address, schedule, private phone numbers, email, etc.
After all, his enemies already know, right?
The NYT has gone beyond the pale. They need to be reined in.
…
dclydew writes:
The press has no obligation, other than to report what will make money for the company
NONSENSE. They are citizens of this country. Capitalism is all well and good, but this country is more than profit. We used to have a concept called business ethics, until the elite professors decided it was a dumb thing to teach.
The idea is that businessmen keep their pursuit of profit within ethical boundaries. We have fallen far when so many believe a businessman is responsible only for making a profit!
Capitalism cannot flourish without democracy. And democracy requires that most of its citizens have ethics that limit their misbehavior.
At first I thought this was just the usual knee jerk antiBush nonsense the NYT has become famous for, but Keller even ignored the requests of peoople like Lee Hamilton and John Murtha…which leads to me to wonder if this is not as much about hubris as about partisanship..put that together with his “war what war?” attitude and you have a recipe for disaster.
This guy would have spelled the beans about the Manhattan Project or DDay, just because he could.
He needs to be removed from this job, he obviously can not handle the responsibility.
This is a war between the NYT started. It is turning into a war between Article Two and First Amendment. My question is, how many divisions do Dean Baquat and Bill Keller have?
http://valley-of-the-shadow.blogspot.com/2006/06/living-in-cloud-cuckoo-land-pt-2.html#links
John Moore,
We used to have a concept called business ethics, until the elite professors decided it was a dumb thing to teach.
The idea is that businessmen keep their pursuit of profit within ethical boundaries. We have fallen far when so many believe a businessman is responsible only for making a profit!
While I personally agree that ethics should control capitalism (as opposed to money controlling ethics), when ever has this been true? Were 19th century business men ethical? Were they focused on the good of the country, or the good of their pockets? The Robber Barons of the early 20th century? Ma Bell? Microsoft? Enron? When, in the history of this nation has big business really been ethical? The newspapers, at one time seemed to find responsibility with their freedom of speech. However, that appears long dead, particluarly since large corproate businessmen now run the papers.
I would love to see this nation embrace ethics. Not the ethics of a political party, nor the ethics of a particular interpertation of a particular religion, but real ethics. I’ve been to many ‘corproate’ training classes and none of them teach kindness, none really teach true ethics (though they make sure to hit the Political Correctness). Corporations today seem entirely focused on the bottom line, employees take a back seat and customers are in the trunk… the welfare of this nation doesn’t seem to enter the picture at all.
Why should the news media act any differently than the rest of our capitalistic forrays?