Times of treason. The story got Washington so steamed it almost scuttled the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act.
The SWIFT Program. According to the same reporters who broke the NSA story, Risen and Lichtblau, the Bush administration’s Treasury Department had been conducting a top-secret program to monitor financial transactions of known and possible international terrorists. There was nothing illegal about the program, known by the acronym SWIFT, and it was highly effective, resulting in arrests of terrorists and the disrupting of terror plots.
The Times’ exposé on SWIFT in June 2006—coming on the heels of the NSA story and a controversial report about secret “renditions” of terror suspects to third-country locations for interrogation—ignited wide condemnation. While some of the fury was
partisan, much of it reflected a broad public exasperation with the paper’s repeated efforts to divulge classified national security secrets and hobble counterterrorism efforts.
Radcliffe Rant. In June 2006, less than a month after Sulzberger’s generational apologia at New Paltz, the Times’ Supreme Court correspondent, Linda Greenhouse, vented her own ideological preoccupations when she received an award from her alma mater, Harvard’s Radcliffe College. During her remarks in front of eight hundred people, Greenhouse described weeping uncontrollably at a recent Simon and Garfield concert, overwhelmed by the realization that the grand promise of the 1960s generation had been unfulfilled, yielding to the corruption and oppression of the current political moment. She then charged that “our government had turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and other places around the world, the U.S. Congress, whatever.” She also attacked “the sustained assault on women’s reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism,” adding, “To say that these last years have been dispiriting is an understatement.” Greenhouse also took a potshot at immigration enforcement, saying that she felt “a growing obligation to reach out across the ridiculous” fence about to be built on the Mexican border.
Greenhouse took heat from all over, including Times public editors. Byron Calame cited the paper’s ethical guidelines stipulating that reporters and editors who appear on television or radio “should avoid expressing views that go beyond what they would be allowed to say in the paper.” He continued: “Keeping personal opinions out of the public realm is simply one of the obligations for those who remain committed to the importance of impartial news coverage.... The merest perception of bias in a reporter’s personal views can plant seeds of doubt that may grow in a reader’s mind to become a major concern about the credibility of the paper.” Daniel Okrent, the former public editor, said he was amazed by Greenhouse’s remarks: “It’s been a basic tenet of journalism . . . that the
reporter’s ideology [has] to be suppressed and submerged, so the reader has absolute confidence that what he or she is reading is not colored by previous views.”
Frauds and Hoaxes. In numerous instances, the Times has allowed itself to be conned or otherwise used as a vehicle by people who wanted to manipulate or defraud its readers. Some of these mortifying hoaxes reflect the volume and velocity of news in the information age, such that inexperienced editors cannot or do not properly analyze it all for authenticity. But veterans have been conned too, largely because they are submerged in a tide of political correctness: in soft-headed idealism, righteous naiveté, and unconscious double standards resulting from the paper’s preoccupation with diversity. The nature of the hoaxes is varied, but most have involved some designated “victim” group—blacks, illegal immigrants, Muslims, the
The SWIFT Program. According to the same reporters who broke the NSA story, Risen and Lichtblau, the Bush administration’s Treasury Department had been conducting a top-secret program to monitor financial transactions of known and possible international terrorists. There was nothing illegal about the program, known by the acronym SWIFT, and it was highly effective, resulting in arrests of terrorists and the disrupting of terror plots.
The Times’ exposé on SWIFT in June 2006—coming on the heels of the NSA story and a controversial report about secret “renditions” of terror suspects to third-country locations for interrogation—ignited wide condemnation. While some of the fury was
partisan, much of it reflected a broad public exasperation with the paper’s repeated efforts to divulge classified national security secrets and hobble counterterrorism efforts.
Radcliffe Rant. In June 2006, less than a month after Sulzberger’s generational apologia at New Paltz, the Times’ Supreme Court correspondent, Linda Greenhouse, vented her own ideological preoccupations when she received an award from her alma mater, Harvard’s Radcliffe College. During her remarks in front of eight hundred people, Greenhouse described weeping uncontrollably at a recent Simon and Garfield concert, overwhelmed by the realization that the grand promise of the 1960s generation had been unfulfilled, yielding to the corruption and oppression of the current political moment. She then charged that “our government had turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and other places around the world, the U.S. Congress, whatever.” She also attacked “the sustained assault on women’s reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism,” adding, “To say that these last years have been dispiriting is an understatement.” Greenhouse also took a potshot at immigration enforcement, saying that she felt “a growing obligation to reach out across the ridiculous” fence about to be built on the Mexican border.
Greenhouse took heat from all over, including Times public editors. Byron Calame cited the paper’s ethical guidelines stipulating that reporters and editors who appear on television or radio “should avoid expressing views that go beyond what they would be allowed to say in the paper.” He continued: “Keeping personal opinions out of the public realm is simply one of the obligations for those who remain committed to the importance of impartial news coverage.... The merest perception of bias in a reporter’s personal views can plant seeds of doubt that may grow in a reader’s mind to become a major concern about the credibility of the paper.” Daniel Okrent, the former public editor, said he was amazed by Greenhouse’s remarks: “It’s been a basic tenet of journalism . . . that the
reporter’s ideology [has] to be suppressed and submerged, so the reader has absolute confidence that what he or she is reading is not colored by previous views.”
Frauds and Hoaxes. In numerous instances, the Times has allowed itself to be conned or otherwise used as a vehicle by people who wanted to manipulate or defraud its readers. Some of these mortifying hoaxes reflect the volume and velocity of news in the information age, such that inexperienced editors cannot or do not properly analyze it all for authenticity. But veterans have been conned too, largely because they are submerged in a tide of political correctness: in soft-headed idealism, righteous naiveté, and unconscious double standards resulting from the paper’s preoccupation with diversity. The nature of the hoaxes is varied, but most have involved some designated “victim” group—blacks, illegal immigrants, Muslims, the
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