Silence of the Times: When it came to light that the New York Times had held its story for a year on the National Security Agency’s illegal wiretapping of American citizens at George Bush’s behest, we did a spit-take. And when it came to light that Bush himself had tried to spike the story by summoning the editor and publisher to the White House for a tete-a-tete, we did a “huh?”
Seems now everybody is asking questions and getting no answers. Even the Times’ own public editor, or ombudsman, lamented in his Sunday column that his bosses won’t tell him why they waited. Byron Calame sounded almost hurt when he got no response:
For the first time since I became public editor, the executive editor and the publisher have declined to respond to my requests for information about news-related decision-making. My queries concerned the timing of the exclusive Dec. 16 article about President Bush’s secret decision in the months after 9/11 to authorize the warrantless eavesdropping on Americans in the United States.
I e-mailed a list of 28 questions to Bill Keller, the executive editor, on Dec. 19, three days after the article appeared. He promptly declined to respond to them. I then sent the same questions to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, who also declined to respond. They held out no hope for a fuller explanation in the future.
Keller, the editor, issued a couple of statements that explained some of the arcane machinations that went on behind the decision to wait, but Calame is not satisfied that readers were well served by the information not being included in the original article. Maybe Keller and Sulzberger could be forgiven for not exercizing the best judgement with the president and the NSA breathing down their necks. I mean, these guys can make you disappear off a New York street corner and reappear in Romania, fer chrissakes.
But while Calame lobbies for more transparency on behalf of readers, NPR’s On the Media took a different tack, looking at how a national security story evolves and why it takes so long to write one. Host Bob Garfield spoke with Scott Armstrong, former Washington Post reporter and now a moderator between national security reporters and government officials on the most recent On the Media:
BOB GARFIELD: How much does the history of the Times’ relationship with the government affect its behavior and the Bush Administration’s in this particular case?
SCOTT ARMSTRONG: Historically they have had the willingness to suppress information. The Bay of Pigs was something that they soft-pedaled, lowered their story and profile on. They moved people around from different bureaus, at the complaints of the intelligence community, all through the ’50s and ’60s. And you also had this notion more recently that the Times had a reporter, Judy Miller, who was extremely compliant with some of the interests of the administration and seemed to be reporting things that they were feeding her with some regularity, and it raised questions about their independence. That has not been their practice from the mid-1970s, when they broke the original stories about domestic spying, where NSA was spying on American citizens, through recent times. They’ve been very aggressive reporters, very professional and the editorial process has been exactly what you would want it to be – constantly questioning where things are going.
Armstrong’s explanation of the evolution of a complicated story makes sense, and jibes with Keller’s explanation, as well. And in the end, the important thing is that the Times told the president to take a flying leap and published an important story about the abuse of power and the enfringement on personal rights.
Now the only questions that need to be asked are for the president and his administration to answer.
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