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.
I kept hearing Wolf Blitzer saying that all this information was in public domain...what a big fat liar. Yes, the President said we were looking at banking information....I think most assumed that would be wire transfers coming into the United States....and not all wire transfers throughout Europe.
Your "clarification" only served to make your original statement even more pointless.
Mostly but, there might be a few RINOS in the lot. I would love to know!
But why was it declassified, and who was the authorized source? And, if the WSJ is working in the best interests of the U.S., why would they go ahead and publish information just because the NYT did? The plot is thicker than first thought, imho.
President Bush, among others, has since assailed the press for revealing the program, and the Times has responded by wrapping itself in the First Amendment, the public's right to know and even The Wall Street Journal.
PatriotismThe First Amendment is the last refuge of scoundrels.
I read the WSJ regularly. Every now and again one of their staff reporters writes an article that would be best placed in the Boston Globe or NYT, but on the whole I have no problem with their news reporting which tends to be far more objective and factual than the rest of the MSM. Finally, they tend to be unconflicted and explicit about the position they take.
The writing is excellent.
LOL! Well, I guess some of us see only what we want to see, the devil with the truth. :o)
Yes, I couldn't understand his clarification either. Must have been really, really deep or just dumb.
" and the Times has responded by wrapping" ---a fish!
From the editorial in the WSJ:
"The Times decided to publish anyway, letting Mr. Fratto [Treasury's Asst. Secretary for Public Affairs] know about its decision a week ago Wednesday. [snip] Mr Fratto says he believed 'they had about 80% of the story, but they had about 30% of it wrong.' So the Administration decided that, in the interest of telling a more complete and accurate story, they would declassify a series of talking points about the program."
[snip]
"Around the same time, Treasury contacted Journal reporter Glenn Simpson to offer him the same declassified information." They go on to state Simpson had been working on the story.
[snip]
"Our guess is that Treasury also felt Mr. Simpson would write a straighter story than the Times, which was pushing a violation-of-privacy angle; on our reading of the two June 23 stories, he did."
Don't get me wrong, I put the majority of the blame on this leak to the Slimes. I just also questions the Post's, WSJ etc's decision to also go with the story is also suspect in some ways now that they are coming out against the Slimes.
It's a sad fact that our government was forced to declassify previously classified information, used in the war on terror, because we have an overzealous press.
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?
Frankly no. Why not simply say what you mean.
What do you can a man who has a gun carry permit but editorializes against handgun ownership ?
You're wasting your time. You can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason themselves into.
Oh, meeeeooooow, Pinchy.
Well, it would be a classy thing if the New York Times and other newspapers would stop writing daily editorials, tributes, and high praise to themselves -- and give a little bit of recognition and credit to other people in the world -- other than themselves!
It does tend to get a bit wearying -- which might explain why people are dropping their subscriptions like flies -- just like avoiding any other wholly self-preoccupied people with delusions on the street and unavoidable venues in life.
Try to follow...the Treasury Dept decided to declassify and release some information to the WSJ because the NYT got some of it wrong; the NYT was going to publish anyway. It leaked the correct info to the WSJ to take the joy out of the Time's decision to print it in the first place.
This response by an editor of the liberal Oregonian is another great whack at the seditious bastards at the Ny Slimes.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1657984/posts
Who died and left you president of the United States? (NYT)
Oregonian ^ | 6-29-06 | David Reinhard, Associate Editor
Posted on 06/29/2006 1:54:16 PM PDT by veronica
Dear Bill Keller:
Remember me? We met in the elevator here at The Oregonian recently. Your decision to expose a secret program to track terrorist funding got me to thinking I had better write and apologize. I don't think I was sufficiently deferential on our brief ride together. I treated you like the executive editor of The New York Times who used to work for The Oregonian. I had no idea I was riding with the man who decides what classified programs will be made public during a war on terror. I had no idea the American people had elected you president and commander in chief.
Yes, I'm being sarcastic. What's that they say -- sarcasm is anger's ugly cousin? I'm angry, Bill.
I get angry when a few unauthorized individuals take it upon themselves to undermine an anti-terror program that even your own paper deems legal and successful. I get angry when the same people decide to blow the lid on a secret program designed to keep Islamic terrorists from killing Americans en masse.
"The disclosure of this program," President Bush said Monday, "is disgraceful."
Strong words, but not strong enough, Bill.
Your decision was contemptible, but your Sunday letter explaining the Times' decision only undermined your case for disclosure.
"It's an unusual and powerful thing, this freedom that our founders gave to the press . . .," you wrote. "[T]he people who invented this country saw an aggressive, independent press as a protective measure against the abuse of power in a democracy. . . . They rejected the idea that it is wise, or patriotic, to always take the President at his word, or to surrender to the government important decisions about what to publish."
Too true, but the issue here is your judgment. It would be one thing if you ran this story because the program was illegal, abusive or feckless. Yet your paper established nothing of the kind. In the end, your patronizing and lame letter offered only press-convention bromides ("a matter of public interest").
"Forgive me, I know this is pretty elementary stuff -- but it's the kind of elementary context that sometimes gets lost in the heat of strong disagreements," you write, after providing a tutorial on how the government only wants the press to publish the official line and the press believes "citizens can be entrusted with unpleasant and complicated news."
But this is a false and self-serving choice. The issue is your decision to publish classified information that can only aid our enemies. The founders didn't give the media or unnamed sources a license to expose secret national security operations in wartime. They set up a Congress to pass laws against disclosing state secrets and an executive branch to conduct secret operations so the new nation could actually defend itself from enemies, foreign and domestic.
Forgive me, I know this is pretty elementary stuff -- but it's the kind of elementary stuff that can get lost in the heat of strong disagreements. And get more people killed in the United States or Iraq.
Not to worry, you tell us, terrorists already know we track their funding, and disclosure won't undercut the program. (Contradictory claims, but what the heck.) You at the Times know better. You know better than government officials who said disclosing the program's methods and means would jeopardize a successful enterprise. You know better than the 9/11 Commission chairmen who urged you not to run the story. Better than Republican and Democratic lawmakers who were briefed on the program. Better than the Supreme Court, which has held since 1976 that bank records are not constitutionally protected. Better than Congress, which established the administrative subpoenas used in this program.
Maybe you do. But whether you do or not, there's no accountability. If you're wrong and we fail to stop a terror plot and people die because of your story, who's going to know, much less hold you accountable? No, the government will be blamed -- oh, happy day, maybe Bush's White House! -- for not connecting dots or crippling terror networks. The Times might even run the kind of editorial it ran on Sept. 24, 2001. Remember? The one that said "much more is needed" to track terror loot, including "greater cooperation with foreign banking authorities"?
Keep up the good work -- for al-Qaida.
OH!
That is coooool!
Thank you!
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