When the Persian Gulf War began a decade ago, journalists reminded one another of their ethical obligation not to disclose national security information. At the newspaper where I worked, we had sober discussions about exercising prudence.
It came, then, as a shock on the eve of the U.S. and allied ground campaign when our Washington bureau filed a story, accompanied by unusually explicit graphics, detailing the tactics that named military units were going to employ.
We told our Washington bureau editors that this was exactly the sort of story it would be irresponsible to publish. They explained that the details had been volunteered by authoritative sources in the Pentagon and that, moreover, similar stories were being prepared by every major news organization in Washington.
We’re still not going to publish it, we said — and we didn’t.
As it turned out, most news organizations did publish the details, and the details in those stories were wrong. The whole thing was deliberate government disinformation, demonstrating once more that truth is the first casualty of war.
That episode from the first Bush presidency helps to explain why it is so troubling that broadcast and cable news networks agreed this week to a White House request that they not broadcast videotaped statements from Osama bin Laden and his associates.
It’s perfectly natural for the government to want to control the flow of information in wartime. It’s perfectly awful for the media to consent.
The scale is different and the stakes are higher, but the situation is no different from the occasional request that journalists get from local police to refrain from publishing some detail about a crime that might be known only by the culprit.
The answer to such a request from places where I have worked is along these lines:
Thank you for letting us know of your concern. We respect it. Our instinct is to publish news, not withhold it. We don’t make those decisions lightly. Because we take so seriously the obligation to be independent of government control, we will not promise in advance that a particular story will omit information. But we will offer assurance that we will carefully and respectfully make our judgments about whether the information is necessary to each story.
I’ve made such a case to Secret Service agents, to FBI representatives, to police detectives. They understood it. In none of those cases did we, on reflection, give away vital information.
But neither did we give away our right to use the information as we saw appropriate.
What the networks have done is give away their authority to make a news judgment. It’s an unfortunate precedent at the outset of a period of inevitable tension between the government and the fourth estate.
