Freedom (?) Of The Press

Glenn Greenwald has a great post up on the Attorney General's renewed insistence that they can prosecute/imprison journalists who publish news that reveals the administration's criminal behavior classified information. He looks at this story and the larger assaults on the institution of the press itself...

The key sections-

And the only reason, in turn, that the press is a check against the Government is because it searches for and then discloses information which the Government wants to keep secret. That is what investigative journalism, by definition, does. The Government always wants to conceal its wrongdoing from the public, and the principal safeguard in this country against that behavior is an adversarial press, which is devoted to uncovering such conduct and disclosing it to the country...

...The only "leaked" information which we would ever hear [if right-wingers got their way] is information which bolsters the administration's views (such as pre-war claims by Ahmed Chalabi about the existence of Iraqi chemical weapons) or which depicts the President as Our Hero and Protector (like the time he saved the “Liberty Tower” from destruction, or the way he ordered an innovative high-tech scheme to detect unusual levels of radiation in our neighborhood mosques). But leaks which the administration doesn't want us to know because they politically harm the president would never happen because those who are privy to such information (government employees and journalists alike) would be too fearful of criminal prosecution to inform us about it.

That is what this is all about. There is not a single instance -- not one -- which reflects any harm to our national security as a result of any of these disclosures. The press goes out of its way to avoid disclosing information which could harm national security -- the Times concealed all operational details of the NSA program when it disclosed that the President was eavesdropping without warrants and the Post concealed the location of the secret gulags in Eastern Europe when reporting that they existed. These disclosures trigger public debate over highly controversial matters and, as a result, often harm the President politically. But none of them is an example of gratuitous disclosure of secret information intended to harm national security.

That is how our country has operated for at least the last century, through two world wars and scores of other military conflicts...

Yes, that may be true, but.... 9/11 CHANGED EVERYTHING!!!!!!! Or something.

His PS was also a point I found to be noteworthy-

One of the most striking aspects of these escalating attacks on the press is just how silent the major media outlets are about any of this. The Attorney General threatened journalists with prison this weekend on national television. Shouldn't the Times and the Post be editorializing against those threats, at the very least? And yet, from what I've seen today, no newspaper has published an editorial response to the administration. Just silence.

That silence is the question I tried to address a week ago when the ABC News story about surveillance on reporters broke. It is a question that, sadly, has no answer. What would have been headline news 10 years ago today is a story that is only being kept alive by the internet and the occassionally concerned reporter. If a sense of professional self-preservation isn't enough to get journalists to fight back, I don't know what is.