Fit and Unfit to Print

The Wall Street Journal editors weigh in on the Terrorist Funds Tracing Program story, and explains how they got the story and why they decided to publish. Then they take the Tehran New York Times to the woodshed. They are not kind.

"We suspect that the Times has tried to use the Journal as its political heatshield precisely because it knows our editors have more credibility on these matters.

As Alexander Bickel wrote, the relationship between government and the press in the free society is an inevitable and essential contest. The government needs a certain amount of secrecy to function, especially on national security, and the press in its watchdog role tries to discover what it can. The government can't expect total secrecy, Bickel writes, "but the game similarly calls on the press to consider the responsibilities that its position implies. Not everything is fit to print." The obligation of the press is to take the government seriously when it makes a request not to publish. Is the motive mainly political? How important are the national security concerns? And how do those concerns balance against the public's right to know?

The problem with the Times is that millions of Americans no longer believe that its editors would make those calculations in anything close to good faith. We certainly don't. On issue after issue, it has become clear that the Times believes the U.S. is not really at war, and in any case the Bush Administration lacks the legitimacy to wage it."

As the saying goes, read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Human Events Online pulls even fewer punches.