A nasty turn in criticism of press

AN extraordinary public exchange between journalistic leaders occurred this week. It’s worth revisiting because it clarifies the stakes in our increasingly ugly debate over how this country’s news ought to be reported and edited.

Last week, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal denounced the award of Pulitzer Prizes to the Washington Post’s Dana Priest -- whose stories exposed the CIA’s operation of secret prisons where torture occurs -- and to the New York Times’ James Risen and Eric Lichtblau -- who revealed that President Bush has directed the National Security Agency to spy on people inside the United States without obtaining warrants. As the Journal’s editorial writers see it, these reporters were guilty of conspiring with “a cabal of partisan bureaucrats to undermine President Bush by sabotaging the war on terror.”

Tuesday, the New York Times’ executive editor, Bill Keller, responded in an unusual letter to the editor that’s worth quoting at length:

“I leave to others, including the court of public opinion,” he wrote, to decide “whether the government officials who spoke to reporters about secrets that troubled them were partisan evildoers, as the Journal contends, or conscientious public servants, or something more complicated. Since most of them, including the nearly dozen who were cited in the first warrantless eavesdropping story, have not been publicly identified, it’s hard to know how the Journal is so certain of their motives.

“As regards the journalists, the editorial is animated by a couple of assumptions. One is that when journalists write things politicians don’t like, the motivation is sure to be political. The other is that when presidents declare that secrecy is in the national interest, reporters should take that at face value....

“The role of journalism on our side of the news/opinion divide, at least as we aspire to perform it, is not to be advocates for or against any president or any party or any cause. It is not to tell our readers what we think or what they should think, but to provide information and analysis that enables them to make up their own minds. We are sometimes too credulous, sometimes too cynical -- in other words, we are human -- but I think we get the balance right most of the time, and when we don’t we feel an obligation to correct it.”

Keller’s plain-spoken analysis concisely summarizes one side of the ongoing debate over the news media’s values. (Note too that his argument is framed in logical sequence and appeals to verifiable facts.)

The other side was just as well summarized by the immediate response that bounced around the echo-chamber niches on the right side of the Internet. One blogger wrote that the editor’s letter demonstrated that Keller is “either a fool or a liar.... I think the most annoying thing about this piece is the repetition of the same old platitudes about how they just give us the information and let us decide.” (Note here the presumption -- common in these quarters -- that no one with whom you disagree is ever merely mistaken. They always are mentally defective or, more often, deceitful.) Another prominent blogger and radio talk-show host dismissed Keller’s argument as “filler piffle” and asserted that his defense of Priest, Risen and Lichtblau failed to recognize that reporters “may not participate in espionage against the United States.”

Here we come to the most recent -- and nastiest -- turn in this dispute. Ever since the Post published Priest’s reports, a chorus of intensely partisan Republican commentators had been demanding that reporters who write stories based on leaks of classified information be prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917. Some of the most forceful of these calls have appeared in mainstream journals of conservative opinion, such as the Weekly Standard, Commentary and the National Review’s online edition.

One of the odder aspects of this campaign is that most of its participants also are lawyers experienced enough to know that, while the Espionage Act is suffused with murky thinking and ambiguous language, it seems fairly clear that it applies only in time of war. All political rhetoric -- and the very real threat of terrorist Islamo-fascism -- to the contrary, Congress has made no such declaration. Similarly, the act requires that a person “willfully” intended to injure the United States with his or her conduct. Put those two things together and you’ve got a pretty good answer to these conservative commentators’ increasingly angry questions about why the Justice Department isn’t already after Priest, Risen and Lichtblau.

Still, heretofore this side of the debate has asserted that its criticisms are justified by the news media’s incompetence or concealed bias. To move from that, to a critique that asserts reporters are not simply “unpatriotic” but are traitors in the service of a foreign power, is what we used to call a significant escalation.

It’s a charge that isn’t merely divisive, but vicious. The shift from an argument that says “don’t read or trust this stuff” to “throw the people who wrote and edited it into jail” should be a fairly worrying thing to the sober.

In fact, Keller recently took note of that in an e-mail to the National Journal’s Murray Waas. “Some officials in this administration, and their more vociferous cheerleaders, seem to have a special animus towards reporters doing their jobs. There’s sometimes a vindictive tone in [the] way they talk about dragging reporters before grand juries and in the hints that reporters who look too hard into the public’s business risk being branded traitors.”

Since motive has been raised by one side in this argument, it’s fair to speculate about motivation across the board. Those whose minds incline toward empiricism might be interested in a couple of polls released this week. Friday, an Associated Press-Ipsos poll reported that Bush’s approval rating has dropped to 33%, the lowest of his presidency. Forty-five percent of those who described themselves as conservatives said they disapproved of the president. Similarly, 75% of the respondents said they disapproved of the Republican-controlled Congress, and 51% said they wanted the Democrats back in control of the House and Senate.

As hanging famously concentrates the mind, so an impending midterm electoral disaster engenders hysteria among certain of the faithful. (Here it’s worth noting that nearly all of those calling for the prosecution of reporters also are partisan Republican commentators.)

Earlier in the week, a poll conducted by Globescan for the British Broadcasting Corp. and Reuters found that, over the last four years, Americans’ overall trust in their news media actually has increased from 52% to 59%. More than 8 out of 10 say their local newspaper is their most trusted source of news, and 74% say they trust national/regional papers, like this one, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Bad news all around for the treason hunters.

The Espionage Act is an artifact of the white hot fervor that gripped this country during World War I. About that same time, the Montana Legislature passed the most draconian antisedition law in modern American history. It criminalized “any disloyal, profane, violent, scurrilous, contemptuous, slurring or abusive” comment about the U.S. Constitution, the federal government, soldiers or sailors, the flag or the uniforms of the Army or Navy.” This week, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer pardoned nearly 80 people who were tried and sent to prison for violating the act, many of them for comments casually made in saloons or to neighbors.

“This should have been done a long time ago,” said Schweitzer. “In times when our country is pushed to our limits, those are the times when it is most important to remember individual rights.”

If good sense now prevails, our grandchildren will be spared the embarrassment of a similar apology.