Soccer Dad

You may now assume the risk

One of the things that annoys me about the media, is their sense of entitlement. There's an arrogance that since they're work is so important they're allowed to operate with a different set of rules than everyone else.

After some recent media scandals, a number of papers, in order to restore the public's confidence appointed ombudsmen/reader's representatives/public editors to act as a layer of oversignt and serve to represent the public's interest in fair and distortion free reporting. (Some newspapers, like the Washington Post, already had an ombudsman for years.)

Often though, the public editor seems less interested in representing the public than in explaining to the public why certain news judgments, despite the appearance of subjectivity are really OK, if not honorable. When the public editor takes this stance, the underlying attitude seems to be: yes we understand your concerns, but you, the simple public can't possibly understand the noble considerations under which we, the media operate.

This past Sunday the public editor of the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, embarked on such a mission. Recently the Times had published the name of the interrogator of Kalid Sheikh Mohammed and ran into a lot of criticism for doing this. So Hoyt, on Sunday, explained why the Times revealed this secret - not legally secret, but not generally known - information in Weighing the Risk. (via memeorandum)

The justification came down to:

Scott Shane, the reporter, and his editors said that using the name was necessary for credibility. Martinez was, after all, the central character in the story. They said that nobody provided evidence that Martinez would be in any greater danger than the scores of others who have been identified in the news media for their roles in the war against Al Qaeda. Those include other former C.I.A. officers, the warden at Guantánamo, military prosecutors, the lawyer who wrote Justice Department memos justifying harsh interrogation techniques, and even a New York Port Authority policeman who helped arrest a terrorist.

Hoyt, though, did mention that one expert recommended against revealing the name:

But the reporter and editors said they were still worried about Martinez's fears and tried to assess how realistic they were. Shane said he repeatedly pressed the C.I.A. for more information. He called John Kiriakou, a former covert operative who was the first to question another top Qaeda terrorist, Abu Zubaydah. Kiriakou voluntarily went public last December, and Shane wanted to know what happened. Kiriakou mentioned a death threat published in Pakistan and didn't go into much more detail. Kiriakou said he advised Shane not to use the name.

Kiriakou received death threats and the publicity adversely affected his personal and professional life. Still the Times persisted and published the interrogator's name.

In the end Hoyt concludes that the paper acted properly:

The Times and other news organizations have been asked over the years to withhold stories for fear of harm. And they have done so when a persuasive case has been made that the danger -- whether to national security or an individual -- is real and imminent. In this case, there is no history of Al Qaeda hunting down individuals in the United States for retribution. It prefers dramatic attacks that kill indiscriminately. And The Times took reasonable precautions to prevent Martinez from being easily found.

Notice as Hoyt adopts the role of terrorism expert in order to justify the decision.

LGF dismisses Hoyt:

Notice that in the worldview of the New York Times, there are essentially no circumstances at all in which they would have withheld this information.

To call what they're doing "weighing the risk" is ludicrous. A better phrase would be "weighing the potential profit."

There's one other matter that casts the decision of the Times in a worse light. Max Boot writes:

Hoyt's defense might have been more convincing if he had made any attempt to distinguish Martinez's case from that of Valerie Plame. Recall, after all, how the Times editorialists and columnists hyperventilated for years about Plame's outing-an action that, in the immortal words of columnist Paul Krugman, was "both felonious and unpatriotic". But there was not a mention-not one-of La Plame in Hoyt's article. So it remains a matter of speculation how outing one CIA operative can be "felonious and unpatriotic," while outing another CIA operative-one who has made even bigger enemies-is necessary for "trying to tell the public about some of the government's most important and controversial actions."

So is the problem, that the Times was unhappy that they didn't get the chance to reveal Valerie Plame's identity? Actually not. Despite her denials, a Senate subcommittee found that she had a role in the decision to send her husband to Niger that resulted in her husband's famous op-ed in the Times questioning the decisions leading to the war in Iraq. Digging deeper into that decision makes the Times "scoop" a little less credible.

There are two more things that Hoyt writes that make his defense of the Times even worse.

One is that he notes at the end of the article that the reporter, Scott Shane received threatening e-mails in response to this article. It's as if he's saying, "even our reporter put himself at risk for this story, see how important it was to get the information out there." While I'm sure it's unpleasant to get nasty e-mails, there's no indication that these were from anyone other than cranks. The interrogator feared from threat from real live terrorists.

Two, as a postscript Hoyt writes:

In preparing this column, I consulted with Bob Steele, an ethicist at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. His discussion of the Times article can be found at www.poynter.org/nytcia.

The Poynter Institute is a media organization, so Steele isn't just an ethicist, he's a media ethicist. Note that "media" comes first. It certainly did for Hoyt. I can only assume that Steele approved of the Times's decision (if he didn't Hoyt would have mentioned that) and that Hoyt accepted his judgment over that of someone who had actually had a similar experience. The approval of the media ethicist is just further confirmation that the media feel that they operate with their own set of rules apart from the general public.