Tamsey and all,
EXERCISE for the reader. Compare the NYT buried-deep-in-the-paper spin piece which tries to excuse Berger, and paints the criticism, and the investigation, as partisan:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/politics/campaign/21berger.html
...with this Washington Post story:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4189-2004Jul21?language=printer
The Washington Post is also an unabashedly biased, liberal paper, but there is a lot more hard news in the WaPo story. This article also tries to excuse Berger's behavior and spin the investigation as a "sting operation," which they imply shouldn't be conducted against a thief when he's this "prominent," but it also describes: the details of what happened, what alarmed the archivists, how they determined that Berger was pilfering documents, exactly which documents he was pilfering, and how they recovered some of these documents. All of these important details are unknown, absolute terra incognita to the poor gormless throg that depends upon the Times for information.
(I personally did not form a concrete opinion about Berger until I read the Post story. Since the sources, in keeping with the Post's own policies and traditions, are nameless, I have only informed an opinion to the extent that I can rely upon the Post. So right now I hang suspended between the Post, the Times, and Mr Berger's own mouthpiece, none of whom have encouraging records in the credibility arena lately).
So the questions arise. Note that the NYT was the one paper that could not find a way to cover this story in depth before their deadline, originally. Is the WaPo's deadline hours later? Is EVERY other paper's deadline hours later? Is the Washington Post's network of reporters and sources so much better than the Times's that the Times simply didn't get this story? Is their editorial bias such that they did not pursue this story? Or, like the original Berger story, did they have the information and make the decision that it was their solemn duty to The Party to ensure that the public never saw the story?
Rhetorical questions, but I have my answers. Note how similar the last of those questions is to Berger's suspected motive for stealing the documents.
Also -- many papers are accepting the lawyer spin that this is "a violation of Archive rules." As if Berger was running with scissors or talking too loud in the library, or they didn't like his tie. I have been handling classified documents at levels from low to rarefied since 1980. Everybody gets the same briefing while being read-on for access at each level. What the Washington Post describes (and excuses, and the NYT story excuses without describing) is not "a violation of rules," it is several different and specific felonies.
If PFC Snuffy did this with, say, the post-it he had scrawled his frequencies on in the shack where he monitors North Koreans sending Morse Code, his mama would be sending him mail at Leavenworth until about 2015.
Now, I have been American long enough that I understand that the coastal elites don't like to see their Members in Good Standing, of either party, subjected to the same standards as the serfs, and that neither a Republican nor a Democrat "made guy" lawyer-lobbyist would end up making little rocks out of big rocks over a crime of this nature. But there remains a profound disparity in the way a highly partisan paper like the Times handles these things. If Condoleeza Rice or Dick Cheney did this, how would the NYT spin it? Any longtime observer of that deteriorating paper can tell you. Bill Keller and his gang of Democratic Party waterboys and -girls would run 40 days of Page 1 "News Analysis" pieces, ringers for the old Pravda front-page editorials, like they did with Abu Ghraib.
They still have the best composition of any major daily, but that's a pretty meager reason to buy a paper. In my opinion the Times could recover some of its credibility if it publicly admitted, "Yes, we are a Democratic Party organ, we have a political litmus test that requires a deeper shade of partisanship at increasingly high editorial positions, we put a Democratic spin on the news." They do, they know they do, and we know they do, but they still use evasions and half-truths to pretend, I think to themselves more than to us, that they don't.
The declining credibility and circulation of this and many other papers are aligned, in my opinion, not with partisanship but with failing to admit partisanship. It's an obvious breach in Times credibility. If you pick up the Nation or the NYT, you get the same political cant, but The Nation has no pretensions of even-handedness, and so no one is fulminating about The Nation's hypocrisy. There are two paths out of hypocrisy: to stop the bad behavior, or to stop the denial. Either one defuses the charge... but I don't expect either from the Times. Unlike The Nation, they haven't even the integrity to stand up with pride and admit what they stand for.
And papers think their credibility problem stems from one-off liars like Jay Blair and Jack Kelley. Guys, it's not the liars you fired, it's the ones still on the payroll.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F