Decision ‘08

The Journal Breaks Its Silence

Many of the left (including our good friend Peter) have asked why the Wall Street Journal has not been subject to the same level of protest as the NY Times regarding the decision to publish details of the SWIFT program. It’s a fair question, and the Journal has remained silent - until now:

President Bush, among others, has since assailed the press for revealing the program, and the Times has responded by wrapping itself in the First Amendment, the public’s right to know and even The Wall Street Journal. We published a story on the same subject on the same day, and the Times has since claimed us as its ideological wingman. So allow us to explain what actually happened, putting this episode within the larger context of a newspaper’s obligations during wartime.

The Journal was provided with its information by Treasury, who no doubt were angling for a more friendly venue, given the Times‘ decision to go with the story:

According to Tony Fratto, Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, he first contacted the Times some two months ago. He had heard Times reporters were asking questions about the highly classified program involving Swift, an international banking consortium that has cooperated with the U.S. to follow the money making its way to the likes of al Qaeda or Hezbollah. Mr. Fratto went on to ask the Times not to publish such a story on grounds that it would damage this useful terror-tracking method.

Sometime later, Secretary John Snow invited Times Executive Editor Bill Keller to his Treasury office to deliver the same message. Later still, Mr. Fratto says, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, the leaders of the 9/11 Commission, made the same request of Mr. Keller. Democratic Congressman John Murtha and Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte also urged the newspaper not to publish the story.

The Times decided to publish anyway, letting Mr. Fratto know about its decision a week ago Wednesday. The Times agreed to delay publishing by a day to give Mr. Fratto a chance to bring the appropriate Treasury official home from overseas. Based on his own discussions with Times reporters and editors, Mr. Fratto says he believed “they had about 80% of the story, but they had about 30% of it wrong.” So the Administration decided that, in the interest of telling a more complete and accurate story, they would declassify a series of talking points about the program. They discussed those with the Times the next day, June 22.

Around the same time, Treasury contacted Journal reporter Glenn Simpson to offer him the same declassified information. Mr. Simpson has been working the terror finance beat for some time, including asking questions about the operations of Swift, and it is a common practice in Washington for government officials to disclose a story that is going to become public anyway to more than one reporter. Our guess is that Treasury also felt Mr. Simpson would write a straighter story than the Times, which was pushing a violation-of-privacy angle; on our reading of the two June 23 stories, he did.

The Journal was encouraged to cover the story, then, and had the tables been turned, the decision would have been different:

We recount all this because more than a few commentators have tried to link the Journal and Times at the hip. On the left, the motive is to help shield the Times from political criticism. On the right, the goal is to tar everyone in the “mainstream media.” But anyone who understands how publishing decisions are made knows that different newspapers make up their minds differently.

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. And while Journal editors knew the Times was about to publish the story, Treasury officials did not tell our editors they had urged the Times not to publish. What Journal editors did know is that they had senior government officials providing news they didn’t mind seeing in print. If this was a “leak,” it was entirely authorized.

Would the Journal have published the story had we discovered it as the Times did, and had the Administration asked us not to? Speaking for the editorial columns, our answer is probably not. Mr. Keller’s argument that the terrorists surely knew about the Swift monitoring is his own leap of faith. The terror financiers might have known the U.S. could track money from the U.S., but they might not have known the U.S. could follow the money from, say, Saudi Arabia. The first thing an al Qaeda financier would have done when the story broke is check if his bank was part of Swift.

Just as dubious is the defense in a Times editorial this week that “The Swift story bears no resemblance to security breaches, like disclosure of troop locations, that would clearly compromise the immediate safety of specific individuals.” In this asymmetric war against terrorists, intelligence and financial tracking are the equivalent of troop movements. They are America’s main weapons.

Some might see the administration and the Journal functioning as a mutual admiration society, and say that’s not the vigilent press we need. Perhaps…but equally instructive is the administration’s (correct, in my view) feeling that the Times cannot be trusted to avoid editorializing the news.

At the heart of this story is a curious double-standard that would make Marie Antoinette proud: on the one hand, the story is not newsworthy (never mind that the Times spashed it on the front page). After all, any idiot knows the terrorists are aware that we are tracking their finances.

On the other hand, Pinch and Bill Keller are heroes, for publishing this expose that furthers the pattern of an administration prepared to jettison the Constitution in their quest for more executive power.

Which is it, then? Because depending on the answer, we either conclude that (a) the Times is so consumed by opposition to this administration that they have lost their sense of news, or (b) they are so consumed by opposition to this administration that they have lost their perspective and their ability to avoid coloring the news to fit their own biases…

4 Responses to “The Journal Breaks Its Silence”

1 miriam Says:
June 30th, 2006 at 7:46 pm
Both a and b are correct assumptions. The treason of clerks.
2 Decision ‘08 » Blog Archive » Eleanor Clift: In A Class Of Her Own Says:
June 30th, 2006 at 9:41 pm
[…] 2008 : Jun 30th - 10:41pm « The Journal Breaks Its Silence […]
3 nettie Says:
July 1st, 2006 at 7:21 pm
Gee, and here I was listening to my sister tell me the Journal was unbiased.
4 Joe E. Griffin Says:
July 13th, 2008 at 10:48 am
Do you have anything on the effects or causes of silence of local government officials. I live in a town where the Town Council never speaks about town problems or their feeling about their votes on those matters leaving us citizens to wonder WHY they voted as they do. As a sidelight we haven’t had anything but a 5-0 vote on the Council for over five years.