Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, had quite a debate this past Sunday on “Face the Nation” with Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times.
The first Keller said that the Times put no American in danger with its story about the U.S. government monitoring the financial transactions of terrorists because terrorists already knew what was going on. The administration has been talking about all of this openly, he said.
But in virtually the same breath, Keller told us that the American people did not know the scope of the program, which is to say, The Times did put new information on the table after having interviewed any number of anonymous sources with access to classified reports. He did not go on to say the obvious: If there was nothing new in the story — no news — there would have been no point in publishing it.
It seems to me that Keller No. 2 wins this debating point, and that he therefore ought to concede that The Times was playing fast and loose with American lives.
After all, knowing that the administration was trying to prevent the funding of terrorist crimes is roughly akin to knowing that the FBI wants to catch bank robbers. What terrorists knew more explicitly about this program after publication of The Times story could jeopardize the program’s effectiveness, according to top officials, including President Bush himself. Keller — who has no extensive national security background, to my knowledge — thinks differently.
Oh, OK.
One excuse for publishing the story might have been that the program constituted some extraordinary abridgment of citizen rights, but no such thing. It’s legal and all kinds of mechanisms are in place to see that it does not reach beyond its stated purposes. Keller mouthed a few concerns about the program. By his calculations, not enough members of Congress had been briefed on it, although key members of Congress had received a briefing. And there’s this troublesome thing that an “emergency” program had “acquired a kind of permanence.” Does Keller think the war on terrorism is over?
But Keller, an alert self-debater, could not conceivably argue that something unbelievably amiss was going on here, and he also said, “I don’t think the threshold test about whether you write about the government waging the war on terror is whether they’ve done something blatantly illegal or outrageous. I think you probably would like to know what they’re doing that’s successful, as well.”
There we have it. The New York Times ignored administration pleas not to go with the story so that the American public could know what a good job the administration was doing.
A couple of thoughts.
The New York Times was not alone in breaking this story, and to the extent the other papers repeated the precise same information and would have gone with it in the absence of knowing The Times was going with it, they should be held equally accountable. That does not mean the First Amendment rights of The Times or these other papers should be in any way endangered, only that they should never consider those rights to be an excuse for irresponsibility or assume they are a shield guarding them from legitimate criticism. The Times’ error in judgment has been made prettyevident by the two faces of Bill Keller.
The second point is simply that our American civilization is at stake when terrorists with possible access to weapons of mass destruction are intent on killing as many of us as they possibly can. The Times needs to grant this war is not done with yet.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies.
