The Wall Street Journal Editorial Disgraces
The Paper's News Section and the Press
By M.P. Prabhakaran
“Fit and Unfit to Print,” The Wall Street Journal’s June 30, 2006, editorial is replete with arrogance and stupidity. Let’s first get the stupid part out of the way.
On June 23, 2006, The Journal published an article disclosing a secret program the Bush administration has put in place to track terrorist financing. It was put in place soon after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The program, as the article says, gives the administration access to the records maintained by a Belgium-based firm “that handles nearly all international financial transfers.” The name of the firm is Swift, which is an acronym for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. Nearly 8,000 financial institutions – banks, broker/dealers, stock exchanges, etc. – spread over 205 countries are its clients. This nerve center of the global banking industry keeps records of wire transfers of about $6 trillion a day among those clients.
Articles disclosing this information also appeared in The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, on the same day. President Bush, as was expected, called the disclosure a “disgrace.” Amen, said his minions.
The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times stood by their stories and defended their decision to publish them over the Bush administration’s objection. The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, got scared. Anxious to retain its privileged position of being the Bush White House’s favorite propaganda sheet, it feverishly began work on damage control. In the process, it disgraced the news department of the paper, its reporter Glenn R. Simpson who wrote the story, and the press as a whole. This is how the June 30 editorial did the disgracing:
“We should make clear that the News and Editorial sections of the Journal are separate, with different editors. The Journal story on Treasury’s antiterror methods was a product of the News department, and these [editorial] columns had no say in the decision to publish.”
What a silly explanation! Those who are familiar with the way mass-circulation newspapers operate do know that their news and editorial departments function under different editors. But they also know that neither disowns the other when crisis erupts over a particular story. The ultimate responsibility for what appears under the masthead of a newspaper devolves on its top-most editor and publisher. In disavowing a story published in the news section of their own paper Journal editorialists are declaring themselves to be stupid – as stupid as a TV news anchor’s saying that he only reads the news, its contents are the responsibility of those who prepared it. And especially in the case of The Wall Street Journal, it is the marvelous stories that appear in its news section that make it worthy of being called a newspaper. Not the paeans of praise for Republican administrations which paleocon pen pushers pour into its editorial columns. Moreover, the news-department-did-it excuse will not wash in a court of law.
One wonders why the editorial, after distancing itself from the paper’s news division, should bother to give an explanation for the latter’s publishing the story. If, however, the purpose behind the explanation was to reestablish the editorialists’ credentials as the Bush White House’s puppets, it did an excellent job. This is how the explanation goes:
“Some argue that the Journal should have still declined to run the antiterror story. However, at no point did Treasury officials tell us not to publish the information.” To suggest that, at The Wall Street Journal, it is government officials, not the newsworthiness of a story, that determine whether it is publishable is to add insult to the injury the editorial has already inflicted upon the paper’s news department. That department deserves more credit than that.
In striking contrast to The Journal, which published the Swift story because “at no point did Treasury officials tell us not to publish” it, The New York Times published it in spite of Treasury officials’ attempt to block it. “We have listened closely to the administration’s arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration,” Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, reporters of The Times who wrote the story quote their executive editor Bill Keller as saying. “We remain convinced that the administration’s extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest.” That is, at The Times, public interest dictates what is publishable and at The Journal, according to its editorial page, government officials do.
The Times Defends the Story
The Times’s editorial page, again in admirable contrast to that of The Journal, gave unwavering support to the news department in its decision to publish the story. It showed the support through two editorials and an Op-Ed piece its executive editor wrote, jointly with editor Dean Baquet of The Los Angeles Times. "Following the Money, and the Rules," The Times’s June 24 editorial, said:
"When government agencies are involved in continuing investigations that might infringe on Americans' privacy, it is important that some outside entity is keeping track of what is going on. That principle is particularly true now, when the United States is trying to learn how to live in a perpetual war on terror.
"Investigators will probably need to monitor the flow of money to and from suspected terrorists and listen in on their phone conversations for decades to come. No one wants that to stop, but if America is going to continue to be America, these efforts need to be done under a clear and coherent set of rules, with the oversight of Congress and the courts."
In a second editorial, published on June 28 under the title “Patriotism and the Press,” it once again stressed the last point: “Ever since Sept. 11, the Bush administration has taken the necessity of heightened vigilance against terrorism and turned it into a rationale for an extraordinarily powerful executive branch, exempt from the normal checks and balances of our system of government.”
In other words, it’s the Bush administration’s excessive secretiveness, disdain for checks and balances mandated by the Constitution, and its tendency to grow into an imperial presidency that prompted The Times to publish the story revealing its secret plan on international money transfers.
Let’s now get to the arrogant part of the editorial, the part devoted to boasting and mudslinging at The New York Times, its executive editor, and its publisher. The editorial is so furious that, in a recent commencement address, the Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., exposed the lies the Bush administration and the Journal editorial page spread about the reason for starting the Iraq war and the way it has since been conducted. The part of the address that annoyed the editorialist the most is: “You weren’t supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights.” It was a bold and candid speech. And it’s despicable that the Journal editorial should cook up another lie to respond to it: “a newspaper led by someone who speaks this way to college seniors has as a major goal not winning the war on terror but obstructing it.”
What Mr. Sulzberger said has the backing of most people in the world who are by now convinced that it was lies that made the war on terror expand into Iraq. Now that the Iraq war has become a fait accompli, neither Mr. Sulzberger nor anyone in the country wants to settle for any other option than winning it. Any other option would mean deaths of many more thousands of innocent human beings and total destruction of Iraq. It is diabolical for the Journal editorial to say that “obstructing” the war on terror is “a major goal” of The New York Times. One hopes and prays that such cheap shots don’t stop the paper from continuing the commendable job it has been doing in exposing the Bush White House’s lies about the Iraq war, shamelessly endorsed by Journal editorialists.
Delusions
And “shameless” is the apt description of the June 30 editorial’s boasts that The Times was trying to “wrap” itself in The Wall Street Journal; that it “has since claimed us as its ideological wingman”; and so on. What made the editorial entertain such delusions? To answer the question, we have to go back to the two Times editorials we mentioned earlier. The June 24 editorial had said that “similar articles [had appeared] in The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times.” The June 28 editorial had said: “Our own judgments about the uproar that has ensued would be no different if the other papers that published the story, including The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, had acted alone.”
Those two references, though made in passing, were courteous gestures on the part of The Times. Instead of appreciating them, Journal editorialists used them to indulge in self-adulation. They have already declared their respectable news division unworthy of being associated with. Which means they are speaking only for the editorial page. Do they think any newspaper worth its salt will want to wrap itself in a rag? And do they think any paper will want to give such a rag the status of being “its ideological wingman”?
If they fear that the appearance of the Swift story in their paper has angered the White House, they may beg for its forgiveness. But they can do it without making conceited claims like: “the Times has tried to use the Journal as its political heatshield precisely because it knows our editors have more credibility on these matters.” When arrogance and stupidity cloud the mind, it fails to see the truth. The truth is this: if, as the editorial says, “more than a few commentators have tried to link the Journal and Times at the hip,” it is because of the commendable job their colleagues in the news department do.
Even those living in Communist countries would agree that the role of the press, vis-à-vis the government, is that of a watchdog. In publishing the Swift story, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and the news division of The Wall Street Journal played that role in good faith, and within the constraints imposed by the ongoing war on terror. The editorialists on The Journal are outraged by it. They may want to read what Nicholas D. Kristof wrote in his July 4, 2006, column in The New York Times: “Watchdogs can be mean, dumb and obnoxious, but it would be even more dangerous to trade them in for lap dogs.”
[Published on July 13, 2006.]
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