The Times's publisher, Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr ... was a sixties anti-war activist who famously declared that in a confrontation between an American and a North Vietnamese soldier he'd want to see the American get shot."
Posted on 06/30/2006 10:53:12 AM PDT by mathprof
After remaining mum for the past week, even as controversy swirled around newspapers' revealing the banking records surveillance program, the Wall Street Journal editoral page weighed in today. Although the Journal published its own story just hours after The New York Times -- which has taken the most heat -- its editorial defended its own action while blasting the Times.
It even included a personal slam at Times' publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. and said the Times did not want to win, but rather obstruct, the war on terror.
Sulzberger responded this afternoon: "I know many of the reporters and editors at The Wall Street Journal and have greater faith in their journalistic excellence than does the Editorial Page of their own paper. I, for one, do not believe they were unaware of the importance of what they were publishing nor oblivious to the impact such a story would have."
Among other things, the editorial criticized the Times for using the Journal as "its ideological wingman" to deflect criticism from the right. And it pointed out that the news and editorial departments are quite separate at the paper and if given the option the editorial side would not have printed the Times' story.
Finally, it explained how it got its own story, then slammed the Times for a wide range of sins, claiming that the "current political clamor" is "warning to the press about the path the Times is walking."
The Times has defended its reporting, saying publication has served America's public interest. Its executive editor, Bill Keller, said in a statement on Thursday that the paper took seriously the risks of reporting on intelligence.
"We have on many occasions withheld information when lives were at stake," Keller said. "However, the administration simply did not make a convincing case that describing our efforts to monitor international banking presented such a danger. Indeed, the administration itself has talked publicly and repeatedly about its successes in the area of financial surveillance."
Journal editors have not responded to repeated requests from E&P for comment this week.
Here are a few excerpts from Friday's Journal editorial. *
We recount all this because more than a few commentators have tried to link the Journal and Times at the hip. On the left, the motive is to help shield the Times from political criticism. On the right, the goal is to tar everyone in the "mainstream media." But anyone who understands how publishing decisions are made knows that different newspapers make up their minds differently.
Some argue that the Journal should have still declined to run the antiterror story. However, at no point did Treasury officials tell us not to publish the information. And while Journal editors knew the Times was about to publish the story, Treasury officials did not tell our editors they had urged the Times not to publish. What Journal editors did know is that they had senior government officials providing news they didn't mind seeing in print. If this was a "leak," it was entirely authorized....
The problem with the Times is that millions of Americans no longer believe that its editors would make those calculations in anything close to good faith. We certainly don't. On issue after issue, it has become clear that the Times believes the U.S. is not really at war, and in any case the Bush Administration lacks the legitimacy to wage it.
So, for example, it promulgates a double standard on "leaks," deploring them in the case of Valerie Plame and demanding a special counsel when the leaker was presumably someone in the White House and the journalist a conservative columnist. But then it hails as heroic and public-spirited the leak to the Times itself that revealed the National Security Agency's al Qaeda wiretaps.
Mr. Keller's open letter explaining his decision to expose the Treasury program all but admits that he did so because he doesn't agree with, or believe, the Bush Administration. "Since September 11, 2001, our government has launched broad and secret anti-terror monitoring programs without seeking authorizing legislation and without fully briefing the Congress," he writes, and "some officials who have been involved in these programs have spoken to the Times about their discomfort over the legality of the government's actions and over the adequacy of oversight." Since the Treasury story broke, as it happens, no one but Congressman Ed Markey and a few cranks have even objected to the program, much less claimed illegality.
Perhaps Mr. Keller has been listening to his boss, Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who in a recent commencement address apologized to the graduates because his generation "had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government.
"Our children, we vowed, would never know that. So, well, sorry. It wasn't supposed to be this way," the publisher continued. "You weren't supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land. You weren't supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights," and so on.
Forgive us if we conclude that a newspaper led by someone who speaks this way to college seniors has as a major goal not winning the war on terror but obstructing it.
Keller'd be wearing them.
>Read the editorial. If you don't understand it, get someone to explain it to you.<
You don't understand my post. By saying the WSJ Pot is calling the NYT Kettle black, I am indicating that the Globalists have their feet firmly perched in both publications. Comprende?
"A. Lincoln: A house divided cannot stand."
It seems that history is repeating itself here, with the obvious differences of time and place. Lincoln waged a furious war on a press which he believed to be undermining the war effort. The list of Newspapers either shut down or swayed to change is numerous. I'm surprised Bush and the House Republicans waited this long to do the same. The question is: How many papers will they go after? It's obvious that the Times is not the only paper that defies the govt.
"...some officials who have been involved in these programs have spoken to the Times about their discomfort over the legality of the government's actions and over the adequacy of oversight."
Oh, bet these officials wouldn't be of the left wing persuasion and sporting an agenda would they?
"...some officials who have been involved in these programs have spoken to the Times about their discomfort over the legality of the government's actions and over the adequacy of oversight."
Oh, bet these officials wouldn't be of the left wing persuasion and sporting an agenda would they?
Conclusion: Rock was well-aimed and caused some pain.
These clowns should be tried for treason....
The WSJ and LA Times were going to hold the story....then the NY Times put it on the web.
>How are they explaining their decision ro run the report while slamming the Times?<
Perhaps they resorted to the old "a good offense is more effective than a weak defense" adage?
Read the article. Once the government knew for a fact that the Slimes would publish, they declassified and released certain information to the other reporters to deny the Times an exclusive, and because they thought (correctly) that the Times would cast the piece unfairly (falsely implying privacy concerns), and because the Times apparently had a bunch of stuff wrong.
IOW the Journal was publishing NON-LEAKED information they'd received from government officials on June 22, the day before the story broke, and which they'd never been asked not to publish.
Not even a little.
The NY Times was asked repeatedly by the government to spike their illegally-sourced story because it would harm intelligence gathering methods.
The Wall Street Journal was provided their information by named people in the Treasury department when it became clear that the Times would run their unauthorized story.
The kettle was working against the people charged with rooting out al Qaeda, while the pot was working with those people.
If you can't see the difference, maybe its your glasses that are black.
Fight dirty: quote them accurately.
"Damn, I better stay away from those Marines."
When MacArthur and Hecht wrote the Front Page, they portrayed the press as a bunch of lovable drunken bums which did not have much regard for the truth. Kind of an artistic twist on the literary myth of a hooker with a heart of gold. With the advent of celebrity they were able to step up in popular culture hiearchy. This latest instance may help to put them in the proper place which are sober PC mean-spirited ideologues with a hate America agenda. It all makes one long for the drunken bum journalists of 20's whose only ideology was the one imposed on them from the top by W R Hearst.
See my post #63.
The editorial is a brilliant evisceration of the NYT. The editiorial points out that the WSJ published only the talking points that Treasury felt comfortable revealing. The NYT evidently got 30% of the story wrong.
bttt
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