The New York Times and WikiLeaks

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The New York Times and WikiLeaks
16 December 2010

In the ongoing campaign of persecution against WikiLeaks and its founder Julian
Assange, the New York Times, the principal voice of American liberalism, has
played a particularly filthy role.

Since the initial release of US State Department documents late last month, the
Times has sought to downplay the significance of the revelations. It has largely
ceased publication of new articles on the cables, confining those that it does
produce to its inside pages. From the start, it has tailored its coverage to
bolster US interests. The more significant exposures of US criminality are ignored.

As for the escalating international campaign targeting Assange, the Times has
maintained a deliberate silence. It has not published a single editorial on
Assange’s arrest or the calls from sections of the US political and media
establishment for him to be killed and for WikiLeaks to be branded a terrorist
organization. This is tantamount to tacit support for this campaign.

The role of the Times as an adjunct of the state was brazenly proclaimed by
Executive Editor Bill Keller in extraordinary comments posted November 29 in
response to a series of letters arguing that the Times has no right to report on
the classified documents.

Keller began by declaring that he was “uncomfortable” with the notion that the
editors of the Times “can decide to release information that the government
wants to keep secret.” The editor’s “discomfort” at performing what has
traditionally been considered one of the most essential roles of the media says
a great deal about the real function of organs such as the New York Times.

“We have as much at stake in the war against terror as anyone,” Keller
continued. “So the thought that something we report might increase the dangers
faced by the country is daunting and humbling… When we find ourselves in
possession of government secrets, we think long and hard about whether to
disclose them.”

Here Keller accepts entirely the legitimacy of the “war on terror,” which, as he
is well aware, has been used as a catch-all pretext for a series of criminal
wars. The Times itself played a critical role in legitimizing the lies used to
launch the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. By declaring that the newspaper has as
much a stake in the “war on terror” as anyone, Keller is, in fact, proclaiming
the Times’ unconditional support for the interests of American imperialism.

In considering whether to disclose information, Keller wrote, the Times engages
in “extensive and serious discussions with the government.” Here he evinces no
conception of the press as an institution independent of the state. That the
Times should discuss its publishing decisions regularly with the US government
is for him perfectly natural.

In a passage that could have come straight from Orwell, Keller wrote, “We agree
wholeheartedly that transparency is not an absolute good. Freedom of the press
includes freedom not to publish, and that is a freedom we exercise with some
regularity” [emphasis added].

For Keller, the question of the freedom of the press is not a matter of the
right of the public to know state secrets through the investigative inquiries of
the press, but the right of the state, through its connections in the media, to
keep information “with some regularity” from the American people. It is already
known that the Times decided to sit on stories involving illegal domestic spying
and torture carried out by the United States. How many other crimes is the
newspaper helping to cover up?

In relation to the recently released documents, Keller continued, “We have
withheld from publication a good deal of information in these cables that, on
our own and in consultation with government officials, we believed could put
lives at risk or could harm the national interest.” These conditions for
withholding information from the American people—“could put lives at risk or
could harm the national interest”—are so broad as to cover virtually anything.

Not only did the Times censor itself, it worked essentially as an arm of the US
government in trying to get other news organizations with access to the
documents to follow its lead. Keller noted in his November 29 posting that the
Times sought to inform the other news organizations in possession of the
documents “both the State Department’s concerns about specific disclosures and
our own plans to edit out sensitive material. The other news organizations
supported these redactions.”

For the Times, the release of the documents by WikiLeaks is a misfortune. Keller
would prefer that this information—and previous leaks documenting the criminal
character of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—were kept secret. Given that
the information was coming out anyway, however, the role of the Times was to vet
it and function as a “gatekeeper” and guardian of state secrets.

The Times had the option, Keller wrote, “to ignore the secret documents, knowing
they would be widely read anyway, picked over, possibly published without
removal of dangerous information, probably used to advance various agendas
[i.e., agendas opposed to the policy of the US government]; or, to study them,
put them in context, and publish articles based on them, along with a carefully
redacted selection of actual documents. We chose the latter course.”

In a recent interview on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” program, the New
York Times’ chief Washington correspondent David Sanger was, if anything, even
more explicit. “We are filtering it out to try to avoid the greatest harm to
individuals, ongoing operations [i.e., military and secret intelligence
operations], and so forth… Had we waited for this all to appear on the Internet…
we would not have had as much time to think as hard as we did about what should
and should not be redacted.”

A more open self-condemnation and exposure of the Times and the US media as a
whole would be hard to imagine. The decay of democratic consciousness within the
US media establishment has reached a level that such declarations of
journalistic prostitution can be made without a trace of shame. The American
media is “embedded” with the US military and intelligence apparatus not merely
on the battlefield, but at all times and under all conditions.

Keller functions as a state operative and the Times as a state institution.
After reading these comments, no person in his right mind would go to the Times
with information potentially harmful to the US government. Such a meeting would
undoubtedly be followed by a call from Keller to the State Department or to US
intelligence agencies.

Such statements would have struck journalists of a previous generation as
unimaginable. Even if newspapers in earlier times engaged in discussions with
the government—and they did—it would have been considered impermissible to
acknowledge this openly.

Everything Keller says is a repudiation of the position the Times took in
relation to the Pentagon Papers. In 1971, the Times faced a US government suit
attempting to prevent it from publishing leaked documents exposing the lies and
crimes associated with the US war in Vietnam. The newspaper refused to reveal to
the government what documents it had. It considered such a move to be a
violation of principles central to the freedom of the press and to democracy as
a whole.

To open up the Times documents to government inspection, the newspaper’s lawyer,
Floyd Abrams, argued at one court hearing, would be to expose it to “a fishing
expedition through files of a newspaper which are as protected by the First
Amendment as one could imagine.”

After the Supreme Court sided with the Times and declared that publication of
the Pentagon Papers could go forward, the newspaper wrote in an editorial that
the decision had implications beyond the freedom of the press. “We believe,” the
Times declared, “that its more profound significance lies in the implicit but
inescapable conclusion that the American people have a presumptive right to be
informed of the political decisions of their Government.”

Not only does the Times now consider this “presumptive right” to be void, it
sees the role of the mass media—in contrast to organizations such as
WikiLeaks—as guaranteeing government secrecy.

The thoroughgoing decay of democratic consciousness evinced by the New York
Times—which has long functioned as a principal voice of the bourgeois political
establishment—is one reflection of a broader transformation of American society.
A state-controlled press is an inevitable corollary of the emergence of a
corporate aristocracy.

Joseph Kishore

The author also recommends:

New York Times editor touts role of establishment press in “war on terror”
[21 October 2006]

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/pers-d16.shtml

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