NYT's Calame: Oops. Our Bad.
The New York Times' public editor, Byron Calame, initially supported the publication of the confidential national-security program that tracked terrorist financing through the Swift banking program. Now, at the end of his column and far past the "jump", Calame acknowledges that the Times made the wrong decision:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/opinion/22pubed.html?ei=5090&en=53abf343d208208c&ex=1319169600&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print
Since the job of public editor requires me to probe and question the published work and wisdom of Times journalists, there’s a special responsibility for me to acknowledge my own flawed assessments.
My July 2 column strongly supported The Times’s decision to publish its June 23 article on a once-secret banking-data surveillance program. After pondering for several months, I have decided I was off base. There were reasons to publish the controversial article, but they were slightly outweighed by two factors to which I gave too little emphasis. While it’s a close call now, as it was then, I don’t think the article should have been published.
Those two factors are really what bring me to this corrective commentary: the apparent legality of the program in the United States, and the absence of any evidence that anyone’s private data had actually been misused. I had mentioned both as being part of “the most substantial argument against running the story,” but that reference was relegated to the bottom of my column.
The story here is that there was no story. Calame comes to this conclusion a little late, and in this case, it's not better late than never. First, Calame puts this mea culpa at the bottom of his column, after a discussion of advertising in the newspaper industry -- another decision that calls into question the editorial competence of the Paper of Record. Second, this comes months after the revelation of the program and the damage it did, both to national-security efforts and to the Bush administration. An "oops" by Calame hardly addresses either.
Reading his effort here, Calame makes it clear that the publication of this story amounted to either incompetence or malice; no other explanation works. The Times knew that no laws had been broken, nor did they ever find any evidence that program officials abused the information gathered. The Times used mutually exclusive arguments to answer their critics after its publication; on one hand, they trumpeted the program as a secret that could lead to abuse (which they never found), and on the other they argued that everyone knew about it, including the terrorists. It took Calame almost four months to discover this rather transparent contradiction.
Calame says that his intial support came from an impulse to protect journalism from the "vicious criticism" of the Bush administration. "Vicious"? I'd like Calame to define that. The administration rightly condemned the Times for risking their ability to track terrorist financing, but I don't recall the administration calling anyone "traitorous", for instance, although plenty of bloggers did. And what kind of ombudsman decides to defend his paper simply because all the right people got angry? That's a mighty thin line of argument, and Calame should be embarrassed to make that admission on the pages of his own paper.
Michelle Malkin responds to this lame excuse:
Every last bit of that "vicious" criticism was deserved. Stop making excuses. It's Bush hatred that led to the reckless publication of the story. It's journalistic hubris that prevents the rest of Calame's colleagues from admitting the truth.
Instead of acting as Chief Apologist, Calame should take his job a little more seriously in the future. The Times blew an important national-security program just to pump up its anti-Bush credentials, regardless of the fact that the program operated within the law and never abused the information it gathered. Calame dislikes the administration as much as the rest of the people at the New York Times, and in the guise of detached analysis endorsed the publication of a non-story in his zeal to undermine the White House using any means at their disposal. Everyone else knew that this story had no merit; it took the Times and its public editor four months to figure it out.
That should tell you everything you need to know about the New York Times.
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/
[Malkin]Every last bit of that "vicious" criticism was deserved. Stop making excuses. It's Bush hatred that led to the reckless publication of the story. It's journalistic hubris that prevents the rest of Calame's colleagues from admitting the truth.
Amen, amen! Kudos, too to the good Captain's Quarters blog which you quoted in extenso. I found them last month, and it's a very good weblog.