Informed Speculation

Byron Calame, the Public Editor of the New York Times, weighs in on the SWIFT revelations, but he needn’t have bothered. Calame claims to have taken ‘a close look at the handling of the article’, but he (truly) adds nothing; no new details, no new justifications beyond those already offered by Bill Keller, and nothing that couldn’t be found in hundreds of other news items and blog postings.

Typical of this limp offering is the following:

There was a significant question as to how secret the program was after five years. “Hundreds, if not thousands, of people know about this,” Mr. Keller said he was told by an official who talked to him on condition of anonymity. The 25 bankers from numerous nations on the Swift board of directors, and their predecessors going back to 2001, knew about the arrangement. So did some consortium executives and staff members — a group that probably expanded during this period. Starting in 2003, Swift representatives had to be stationed alongside any government intelligence official searching the data.

Yes, well, any large-scale government program is going to be known by hundreds, if not thousands – but now millions know. And doesn’t that assertion rather go against the justification that there was no ‘news’ in this article that certain Times apologists keep thrusting on us? If only ‘hundreds, if not thousands’ knew about the program, that’s a rather different thing than asserting that it was common knowledge.

Then again, this is the weakest of arguments to begin with; the front-page placement of the story tells you all you need to know. I would rather expect that Bill Keller and Gail Collins would close ranks and defend the decision to run with the story; I would rather expect that the Public Editor, ostensibly acting as watchdog, would interview someone other than the paper’s employees to get to the bottom of the story.

The watchdog of the watchdog shows no interest, however, in determining why it is that, in his own words, “[r]oughly 1,000 e-mails have come to me, about 85 percent of them critical of the decision to publish the story and a large fraction venomous.” What Keller and Collins have said was expected, even if spectacularly unconvincing. What Calame has done in rubberstamping their decision, without the pretense of investigation, puts the lie to the idea that he has any independence of thought or action…