WikiLeaks’ lauded and condemned release of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables doesn’t change responsible news outlets’ responsibility to weigh national security concerns against the public’s right to know and to verify information and put it in context. And whatever the technology, government and press priorities will continue to clash.
Leading journalists stressed those points Thursday at a Secrecy and Journalism conference sponsored by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation.
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller called government attacks on the disclosures nothing new. He said officials want it both ways: to keep secrets while trumpeting successes. “One man’s security breach is another man’s publicity campaign —Â and sometimes they’re the same man.”
Keller and other speakers said they’ve always taken care to delete material that could identify or harm specific operatives or operations. “There’s no magic formula” for this, he said. “We make our best considered judgment,” and few know when we exercise restraint.
“Common sense, compromise and accommodation” is the best way for officials and the press to mediate their inevitable differences.
While government-press clashes are inevitable, Keller said, more “selective and clear-headed” use of anonymous sources could improve journalists’ reputation with the public. He added, though, “It’s high-minded foolishness” to never print comments by confidential informants.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “is not a kindred spirit,” Keller said. “He’s not the kind of journalist I am.” But he opposes a criminal prosecution of Assange, saying, “that would sound an alarm signal. The Espionage Act is a scary thing in the wrong hands — an abusable law.”
He called government’s subpoena powers the greatest current legal threat to journalism. A proposed federal Shield Law could help, but he called its passage unlikely. Even if it did pass, he said it would contain “enormous loopholes” regarding national security.
Associated Press executive editor Kathleen Carroll termed the standard “national security” argument a “well-worn rationale for secrecy,” saying the U.S. spent nine billion dollars last year on secrecy.
She fears that the attacks on WikiLeaks for allegedly disclosing vital secrets will spark new government censorship efforts. The disclosures “will be cited as reasons for secrecy for years to come.”
She and others believe that established news outlets like hers are the real guardians of openness, noting that the AP filed more than 1,500 Freedom of Information Act requests last year to get what she termed mostly routine information.
“You have to have the stomach to fight every day” using lawyers and staffers, and these fights are becoming “more protracted and expensive,” Carroll said.
Of course new media could take up this battle, she said, but “reporting is hard” and very few Internet outlets are doing the hard digging, the verification and the essential job of putting raw facts in context and protecting confidential sources.
Chilean investigative journalist Alejandra Matus made a similar point. Even though she had to get asylum in the U.S. to escape arrest for her work, she sees the main threat to serious reporting as financial. “Who will pay journalists to read boring documents and bring them to the public?”
Veteran Washington Post intelligence and national security reporter Walter Pincus sees Assange as just another source “who’s learned how to play the p.r. game” by trumpeting his disclosures.
Pincus said he is like other informants, who “all have something to sell.” Pincus asks three questions before using their material: Is it true, is it relevant, and is it something the public ought to know about? “A classified stamp doesn’t make it true and no stamp doesn’t make it newsworthy.”
He said the press often overlooks enormous amounts of important information that isn’t classified, such as daily reports of government contracts and awards and said, “We’ve given up a lot of our ability to set our own agenda and let the government do it. We’re in a public relations society” and the government’s doing p.r. better than us.”
Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, agreed with Pincus’s description of classification as a “game.”
She said, “We’re in a pitched battle to protect whistle blowers of NON-confidential information,” noting that the First Amendment projects not just journalists.
She described a recently-introduced Senate bill as a threat because it would make it illegal to publish the names of military or intelligence community informants. More responsible classification and declassification would ease the disclosure dilemma, Brian said.
Barry Sussman, who helped supervise The Washington Post’s Watergate coverage and now edits the Nieman Watchdog Project, said focus on Assange’s motives and possible misdeeds are attempts to “deflect” attention from the WikiLeaks revelations themselves.
Predicting more sustained attacks on The Times and other outlets that printed the material, he said the press should keep its eye on the real issue: the public’s right to know what its government is doing.
