Journalists Should Expose Secrets, Not Keep Them

By Norman Solomon

Journalists should be in the business of providing timely information to the public. But some - notably at the top rungs of the profession - have become players in the power games of the nation's capital. And more than a few seem glad to imitate the officeholders who want to decide what the public shouldn't know.

When the New York Times front page broke the story of the National Security Agency's domestic spying, the newspaper's editors had good reason to feel proud. Or so it seemed. But there was a troubling back-story: the Times had kept the scoop under wraps for a long time.

The White House did what it could - including, as a last-ditch move, an early-December presidential meeting that brought Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office - in its efforts to persuade the Times not to report the story. The good news is that those efforts ultimately failed. The bad news is that they were successful for more than a year.

"The decision to hold the story last year was mine," Keller said, according to a Washington Post article that appeared 10 days after the Times's blockbuster December 16 story. He added: "The decision to run the story last week was mine. I'm comfortable with both decisions. Beyond that, there's just no way to have a full discussion of the internal procedural twists that media writers find so fascinating without talking about what we knew, when, and how - and that I can't do."

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