'Liberal Media' attacked for revealing bank snooping

slate.msn.com

Apparently the New York Times has been targeted exclusively as the primary party responsible for the revelations of the latest government snooping into international bank records.

Rep. Peter King (N.Y.), draping himself with the stars and stripes, has even gone to the extent of asking the Attorney General to investigate and prosecute the Times! One wonders why the Wall Street Journal, which also broke the story at the same time as the Times, was spared.

Consider this measured response from the Exec Editor Bill Keller of the New York Times (I've highlighted a particularly interesting section):

The press and the government generally start out from opposite corners in such cases. The government would like us to publish only the official line, and some of our elected leaders tend to view anything else as harmful to the national interest. For example, some members of the Administration have argued over the past three years that when our reporters describe sectarian violence and insurgency in Iraq, we risk demoralizing the nation and giving comfort to the enemy. Editors start from the premise that citizens can be entrusted with unpleasant and complicated news, and that the more they know the better they will be able to make their views known to their elected officials. Our default position —— our job —— is to publish information if we are convinced it is fair and accurate, and our biggest failures have generally been when we failed to dig deep enough or to report fully enough. After The Times played down its advance knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy reportedly said he wished we had published what we knew and perhaps prevented a fiasco. Some of the reporting in The Times and elsewhere prior to the war in Iraq was criticized for not being skeptical enough of the Administration's claims about the Iraqi threat. The question we start with as journalists is not "why publish?" but "why would we withhold information of significance?" We have sometimes done so, holding stories or editing out details that could serve those hostile to the U.S. But we need a compelling reason to do so.

Forgive me, I know this is pretty elementary stuff — but it's the kind of elementary context that sometimes gets lost in the heat of strong disagreements.

He also makes mention of the failure of the Times in the past failure of the Times in not questioning the government line on Iraqi WMD's aggressively.