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.
Excuse me. My posts are defending the WSJ. I believe that the only objective facts in the NYT are the ball scores and sometimes those are suspect!!
When the NYTimes gets criticized by the Administration, it's a badge of honor (that's how they regard it). When they get criticized by a journalistic rival, it's far more serious.
Nothing would make me happier than to see the Al Qaeda Times run out of the country, along with their jihad journalists.
Could this be the next Sore-Loserman successful campaign courtesy of Free Republic?
Incredibly profound statement - I'll have to borrow that when referring to the Liberal lampposts around here!
No, the Bush administration DID NOT declassify it. Quit making up facts as you go along.
The cock crows by midnight in the springtime. Never hatch a chicken with wings. Scooter my daisy heads.
Irrelevant. WSJ makes it clear that it is very unlikely they would have run the story if Treasury had begged THEM not to do so, but it was the reverse with WSJ -- unlike NYT where Treasury begged them NOT to run the story, Treasury sought out WSJ and ASKED them to run the story. The damage had already been done by NYT's intransigence and Treasury was likely using WSJ for damage control.
The pot is therefore polished and gleaming.
If you're referring to WSJ, then there is a neutral source to verify their defense: Treasury. A scathing open letter was written by Sec. Snow to Keller, which means they are at a point where they are willing to start calling media people out.
But so far Treasury disputes nothing that WSJ has said.
(But if you're referring to NYT, then never mind, my apologies...)
Do you think that's why their teams are "winning" this year?
The Slimes has been a campaign for many of us for years, and we picked up the pace before this hit the fan.
The wSJ only ran the story afte being called by Treasury and being given the just-then declasified information, on Treasury's understanding that the Times was going to print and had many errors in their story.
Ridiculing the Left AQTimes, along with credible charges of treason, make this opportunity vital.
Pile on!
<< You can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason themself into.
Incredibly profound statement .... >>
"Incredibly profound?"
Well it might have been .... except that it is meaningless -- and its author, functionally illiterate.
Perhaps he meant to say to the effect that 'you can't reason someone out of a belief [He] didn't reason [Himself] into?'
Whose lives? American soldiers' or terrorists'?
The NYT has published the street addresses of Cheney and Rumsfeld's summer homes.
In the "Escapes" section of the June 30 edition, the N.Y. Times printed huge color photos of the vacation residences of Cheney and Rumsfeld, "identifying the small Maryland town where they live, showing their front driveways and, in Rumsfeld's case, actually pointing out the hidden security camera in case any hostile intruders should get careless," Horowitz writes.
Times Travel section writer Peter Kilborn even makes sure enemies of the two men will know such details as where Mrs. Rumsfeld shops in the eastern shore town of St. Michaels, Md. where the two administration officials have weekend retreats.
He even lets the curious know what street the Cheneys and Rumsfelds have to use to get to their own road.
It's all part of the war against President Bush, Horowitz charges.
New York Times' Open-Borders Hissy-Fit
. . .
Do you ever wonder what sort of life forms write New York Times editorials: 1) Do they have three heads? 2) Are they strange visitors from another planet? 3) Do they want to star in the musical version of “Das Kapital”? 4) Do they think America consists of Manhattan, Cambridge and Marin County, plus the hinterlands? 5) Do they have pink taffeta tutus hanging in their closets and insist their friends call them Miss Mabel?
Question: What do you get when you cross Cindy Sheehan with John Murtha? Answer: A New York Times editorial writer.
The answer to both of those questions is in the article.
An excellent, and correct, piece of writing.
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