Margaret Sullivan
December 21, 2014
When the Government Says, “Shhh!”
HOWELL RAINES remembers a call from Ari Fleischer not long after the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
Mr. Raines, then the executive editor of The Times, says that Mr. Fleischer, President George W. Bush’s press secretary, made a startling request. He “asked for a promise that we would contact the White House in advance on any national security matter we were reporting.”
Mr. Raines refused, he told me in an email this week: “I said we would make no such promise, but if the White House wanted to request the holding of a specific story, the request would have to come from the president to the executive editor or publisher.” That, he says, was the only time during his two years as editor that he heard from the government about withholding information.
However, the government managed to get around that rebuff at least once during Mr. Raines’s tenure. The recent torture report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee mentions a story that “a major newspaper” held back in 2002 at the government’s urging. The reporter James Risen reported that the newspaper in question was The Times. (The story, about a top Al Qaeda operative being held in a secret Thailand prison, eventually ran the next year.)
Mr. Risen told me that the managing editor, Gerald Boyd, made the decision when Mr. Raines was away. That took place after Mr. Boyd heard from (to the best of Mr. Risen’s recollection) Condoleezza Rice, who was then President Bush’s national security adviser. Mr. Raines finds it hard to believe that Mr. Boyd, who died in 2006, wouldn’t have consulted with him. Separately, Jill Abramson, then the Washington bureau chief and later the executive editor, told me in an email that she hadn’t been involved and that she didn’t recall the incident. The publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, says the same.
The murky details may not matter much now, a decade later. But the broader issue — the relationship between government and press — does matter. A great deal. Under what circumstances should a news organization agree to a government request to withhold a story on the grounds of national security concerns?
The most recent two editors of The Times say that their views on this have changed — and that they think the press sometimes gave in too readily to government pressure.
“The torture report is a reminder that we should be really tough on what we withhold,” Dean Baquet, the executive editor, told me in an interview this week. Echoing remarks he made to NPR’s David Folkenflik, he told me, “I will listen to a serious government request, but I am much, much, much more reluctant” to defer to the government.
The regrettable aftermath of Sept. 11 is one factor in this change of heart; another is what the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed about the government’s broad and deep surveillance. (Mr. Snowden has said he chose not to bring those revelations to The Times; he believed otherjournalists would be less likely to buckle to government pressure to hold his information back.)
Mr. Baquet sees a “full-bodied debate in the country right now” about how the U.S. government behaved after 9/11. The elements of this overarching story, he said, include the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Snowden revelations, the expansion of drone warfare and the role of the C.I.A.
The Times owes it to its readers to give them all the information they need to work through that debate. Yet the requests keep coming. Mr. Baquet told me that, even now, “certainly a month doesn’t go by” that there isn’t some government effort to persuade The Times not to publish something. How often are they successful? “Very rarely.”
And Ms. Abramson, according to a Huffington Post story by Michael Calderone, has said that what seemed reasonable “in real time,” shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, might no longer pass muster. “None of us had a notion of what the ‘war on terror’ would involve and that there would be so many aspects of civil liberties that would be called into question,” Ms. Abramson said. “We were naïve.”
The most well-known tale of The Times holding back information came in 2004. Ablockbuster story on warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency, written by Mr. Risen and Eric Lichtblau, very nearly never made it into print. It was held for 13 months and published only when it became clear it would come out in Mr. Risen’s book “State of War.”
Ms. Abramson’s predecessor, Bill Keller, told me last year that the proximity to the Sept. 11 attacks had affected his decisions: “Three years after 9/11, we, as a country, were still under the influence of that trauma, and we, as a newspaper, were not immune. It was not a kind of patriotic rapture. It was an acute sense that the world was a dangerous place.”
These are difficult calls, particularly when top officials tell editors “you will have blood on your hands” if a story is published, as Ms. Abramson recalls happening.
It’s easy to second-guess decisions in hindsight. But if news organizations — with The Times foremost among them — had been less cooperative and less credulous in the wake of 9/11, the country might well be better off today.
Mr. Baquet put it this way: “Some things happened that, as a country, we now deeply regret.” He said the Senate’s torture report is part of “a remarkable moment” in American history. And citizens “have a right to make their own judgments, and to all the information they need.” That alone, he said, creates “a very high bar” for holding anything back.
It’s good to see Mr. Baquet take this tougher stance now. And it’s good to see The Times finally using the term “torture,” rather than a euphemism, for what can’t be credibly denied.
That The Times has learned from its mistakes here and is willing to discuss them is — amid all the bad news about American civil liberties, government secrecy, and press freedom — a welcome, if belated, response.
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