Maybe it's brain damage

Bill Keller responds to a Wall Street Journal editorial, and shows himself either a fool or a liar:

As regards the journalists, the editorial is animated by a couple of assumptions. One is that when journalists write things politicians don't like, the motivation is sure to be political. The other is that when presidents declare that secrecy is in the national interest, reporters should take that at face value. I don't believe either of those things is true, and I find it hard to believe that you do, either.

This amounts to saying that, while other people must obey the law, but journalists don't have to. They will be the judge of which secrets protect national security and which don't, thank you.

We've seen recently how evenhandedly they make the decision. Valerie Plame's employment is a more important secret than wiretapping Al Qaeda? Give me a break!

I think the most annoying thing about this piece is the repetition of the same old platitudes about they just give us the information and let us decide. That crack that "The other is that when presidents declare that secrecy is in the national interest, reporters should take that at face value," shows the real presumption, that only journalists are legitimate judges of what should and shouldn't be revealed. I think that a few need to be prosecuted to restore the balance.

I emailed the following to Hugh Hewitt after his show today which was mostly about Keller's letter. He suggested I post it here. So I will:

I don't think this man or any of those he supervises have ever thought about what their own assumptions are. The whole thing is a bunch of platitudes strung together:

The role of journalism on our side of the news/opinion divide, at least as we aspire to perform it, is not to be advocates for or against any president or any party or any cause. It is not to tell our readers what we think or what they should think, but to provide information and analysis that enables them to make up their own minds. We are sometimes too credulous, sometimes too cynical--in other words, we are human--but I think we get the balance right most of the time, and when we don't we feel an obligation to correct it.

In other words he doesn't read his own paper, just blithely assuming that's how it is run.

I've heard this baloney from these people since I started listening to the news, and it's getting more absurd every day. The worst results from Watergate was not any actual harm caused by Nixon. The system worked as it should, and as the facts came out the Republicans abandoned him. The real harm was done when the Times bravely published the Pentagon Papers, and assumed from their court victory that nobody is a
higher judge of what should be kept secret than the New York Times. To me, the Pentagon Papers case held that there could be no prior restraint, but the press takes the risk that it might be wrong to publish and be hammered for it. The problem with that is that the Pentagon Papers shouldn't have been classified in the first place. The NSA wiretaps were important to national security, but the Times seemed to forget that the President has lawyers who check this stuff. They have fallen into the trap that nearly everybody on the left has in thinking that Bush just charges ahead without checking his authority.

My dad, before he died, had a series of strokes. One of them affected his visual cortex in such a way that he could only see things in the left of his field of view. When he ate his meals, they had to let him clean the left part of his plate and then turn it around so that he could see the rest of his dinner. He couldn't just move his head to see as you would if one eye was covered.

I think of that every time I read or hear the kind of drivel coming from the press. It may not be brain damage, but it sure resembles it.