Reporting so good it’s ... criminal?

THERE are a lot of ways to react to the annual award of the Pulitzer Prizes, which occurred this week.

You could congratulate the winners -- fulsomely or, as is often the case, through the gritted teeth of a strained smile. You could argue angrily that work more worthy should have won. You could shrug in weary indifference and get on with more important things, like moisturizing the cat. You could quite sensibly ignore the whole thing.

This year, though, there was another reaction -- one that speaks in a particular way to this nation’s extreme polarization and to the new realities of doing journalism in such an environment.

A number of prominent commentators called for jailing three of the prize winners.

What’s interesting about these demands is that they didn’t come from people normally dismissed as part of the lacy fringes of the lunatic extreme but from analysts actively involved in the mainstream’s public conversation, albeit from the ideological right.

The targets of their outrage are three journalists who rendered extraordinary public service this year. New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau won a share of the national reporting prize for exposing President Bush’s approval of warrantless domestic wiretaps by the National Security Agency. Dana Priest of the Washington Post was awarded the prize in beat reporting for stories documenting the CIA’s operation of clandestine foreign prisons where terrorists -- and those suspected of terrorism -- are tortured.

Reliable reporting on the intelligence agencies’ clandestine activities is among the rarest of journalistic achievements. Providing it while lawmakers and, more important, the electorate still have an opportunity to act on the information is rarer still. That may be why former Republican Cabinet secretary William J. Bennett, now a television and radio commentator, used his talk show Tuesday to argue that Priest, Risen and Lichtblau were only “worthy of jail.”

According to Bennett, the three “took classified information, secret information, published it in their newspapers, against the wishes of the president, against the request of the president and others that they not release it. They not only released it, they publicized it -- they put it on the front page, and it damaged us, it hurt us.... As a result, are they punished, are they in shame, are they embarrassed, are they arrested? No they win Pulitzer Prizes. I don’t think what they did was worthy of an award. I think what they did was worthy of jail.... These people who reveal our secrets, who hurt our war effort, who hurt the efforts of our CIA, who hurt efforts of the president’s people -- they shouldn’t be given awards for this; they should be looked into [through] the Espionage Act.”

Bennett’s demand that Priest, Risen and Lichtblau be arrested under the Espionage Act -- a statute that dates to World War I -- echoes a call made months ago in Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard by one of its contributing writers, Scott Johnson, a Minnesota attorney who is one of the principals on the influential Powerline blog.

This week, he used that venue to renew his criticism thusly: “James Risen and Eric Lichtblau won the Pulitzer Prize today for their treasonous contribution to the undermining of the highly classified National Security Agency surveillance program of al Qaeda-related terrorists. As I argued in a column for the Standard, the Risen/Lichtblau reportage clearly violated relevant provisions of the Espionage Act -- a particularly serious crime insofar as it lends assistance to the enemy in a time of war.”

Johnson’s indictment didn’t stop there. “What about the Pulitzer Prize committee?” he asked. “When Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for the [New York] Times in connection with his mendacious coverage of Stalin’s Soviet Union, he performed valuable public relations work for a mass murderer. He nevertheless did no direct harm to the United States. Today’s Pulitzer Prize award to the Times brings a new shame to the Pulitzer Prize committee....”

Ah, Walter Duranty -- the bloody shirt of press criticism. Had he never lived, some blogger would have had to invent him. He was a crook who won a prize in foreign correspondence for his reports on one of Stalin’s five-year plans. Later, he covered up the Soviet-created famine in the Ukraine. The New York Times acknowledged all this decades ago and long has placed an asterisk next to any listing of his award, noting that it was based on “discredited” reporting. The bloggers don’t like to tell you that part.

But what is propaganda beside “treason”?

Sweep out the Bastille! Form up the firing squad!

This is not serious. This is a tantrum.

There is a searching discussion to be had -- one that never can be completed -- on how responsible journalists should handle classified information when reporting on a government that uses the designation as a matter of political expediency and mere convenience, as well as a way to guard the country’s legitimate secrets. Any journalist who doesn’t acknowledge that there are legitimate national secrets is worse than silly; any commentator who pretends that every -- or even most -- things stamped “classified” is among them probably is grinding his or her ax.

In this case, what you have is the latest extension of the right wing’s mantra-like criticism of the American news media. Like the constant hum of traffic, it now seems an unavoidable part of our contemporary life. It’s interesting to recall that it began as a perfectly reasonable -- indeed, beneficial -- discussion of unexamined bias in newspaper and broadcast journalism and of news outlets’ institutional lethargy when it came to correcting errors. As it turns out, though, addressing those things isn’t what the critics have in mind. They don’t want an unbiased news media, they want a press that reflects their bias.

They’d like a press that is wholly blue or wholly red, one that stops bothering a nation increasingly divided in this very fashion with inconvenient facts and doubts. That was a sentiment that came through with particular clarity this week, when the Los Angeles Times was forced to suspend columnist Michael Hiltzik’s blog after it was revealed that he had posted comments on the Internet and this paper’s own website under false names. An editor’s note regarding the decision was published Friday and the circumstances surrounding Hiltzik’s conduct are being examined.

The incident has provoked a kind of cybernetic thunderstorm, and one of the most revealing claps came from talk show host Hugh Hewitt, who used his popular blog to argue against what The Times had done.

In his view, “The paper should admit that their journalists are just polemicists who carry their opinions with them into battles they care deeply about. They are as biased as the day is long and getting longer. They aren’t objective, and never have been.... Hiltzik may be the most honest guy at the Times.”

Here, as in Bennett’s and Johnson’s attack on the three prize-winning reports, we confront an attempt to win through bluster and intimidation what cannot be gained through politics or persuasion.

It takes the prize.