Times' Selective Secrets
by Nathan Tabor

In the last few years, we've witnessed the ongoing battle between the media and the government over the "right" of newspapers to hold their sources confidential. The latest shot in that war was New York Times executive editor Bill Keller's decision to release information about the National Security Agency's efforts to monitor phone calls without court-approved warrants.

The Times had held back on the story for over a year. President Bush had stepped in to personally plead the government's case to continue holding back on the story to Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Keller, and Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman. To make his case that the paper revealed the secret program to the public and then there was another terrorist attack on American soil, the President warned the three that they would be implicated. As Keller later noted, "The basic message was 'You'll have blood on your hands.'"

So what did "The Paper of Record" do? It released the information anyway. Why? Jill Abramson, managing editor at the Times, likened the story to another infamous leak of classified government information decades earlier, claiming that the NSA story "may very well turn out to be this generation's Pentagon Papers."

This indeed is the same attitude. National security be damned, and forget the mantra that the public has a right to know. There's a Pulitzer Prize to be won!

The White House has been fighting back against this view that any classified information that somehow makes its way to them is fair game. Management at the New York Times realizes, however, that their disregard for exposing state secrets has also made the paper and its employees fair game too, and that includes facing government subpoenas, the jailing of reporters to reveal their sources, and ultimately, prosecution.

With all this in mind, you might think that the paper would think twice about showcasing classified information on the its front page that would be read by the public—and terrorists. They're thinking twice all right, thinking twice on how they can thwart "the persistent legal perils that confront us," as Bill Keller has put it.

The New York Observer reports that the Times is now giving lessons to their reporters on how they can best "dispos[e] of story drafts and [cut] back on telephone and e-mail contact with sources-or us[e] disposable cell phones for important calls."

In addition, New York Times reporter David Barstow has recommended other subterfuges such as "altering expense-sheet forms so that a reporter does not have to list the names of sources who have been taken out for lunch or dinner." Barstow adds that even company e-mail should conveniently disappear in a short time in order to hinder any investigation of who might be leaking secrets to the Times staff. "There has been a conversation about changing our e-mail system so that e-mail is automatically deleted after 30 days unless you mark the e-mail for preservation," says Barstow.

So it seems that the Times is concerned about preserving secrets, only it is its own not the government's that deserve confidentiality. Some have the right to know and others do not.

Nathan Tabor, a conservative political activist based in Kernersville, North Carolina, is a contributing editor at the Conservative Voice. His 60-second commentaries are heard on over 250 stations daily.