Free Republic

On Sept. 21, Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet turned 50 years old. When he stepped out into the newsroom that afternoon, following the daily page-one meeting, he was greeted with a birthday cake and a prolonged, loud ovation. The crowd numbered more than a hundred. Two hundred? It sprawled uncountably out of view, around an angle of the newsroom: columnists and top editors and copy editors all mingling, upbeat and merry. The L.A. Times celebrates birthdays, but not like this; at the edges, it was impossible to hear Mr. Baquet’s remarks, let alone hope for a piece of cake....

NEW YORK Managing Editor Paul Steiger of The Wall Street Journal and Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. of The Washington Post were both asked to be part of last weekend's unique joint Op-Ed piece by the editors of The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, which defended the publication of stories about the secret SWIFT bank monitoring program, E&P has learned. But each declined. "We had talked about doing something together," Steiger said. "But when I looked at it and thought about it, our position was so different from theirs -- that nobody asked us not to publish [our...

Since Sept. 11, 2001, newspaper editors have faced excruciating choices in covering the government's efforts to protect the country from terrorist agents. Each of us has, on a number of occasions, withheld information because we were convinced that publishing it could put lives at risk. On other occasions, each of us has decided to publish classified information over strong objections from our government. Last week our newspapers disclosed a secret Bush administration program to monitor international banking transactions. We did so after appeals from senior administration officials to hold the story. Our reports — like earlier press disclosures of secret...

MANY READERS have been sharply critical of our decision to publish an article Friday on the U.S. Treasury Department's program to secretly monitor worldwide money transfers in an effort to track terrorist financing. They have sent me sincere and powerful expressions of their disappointment in our newspaper, and they deserve an equally thoughtful and honest response. The decision to publish this article was not one we took lightly. We considered very seriously the government's assertion that these disclosures could cause difficulties for counterterrorism programs. And we weighed that assertion against the fact that there is an intense and ongoing public...