MSM Doesn't Get Freedom of the Press

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MSM Doesn't Get Freedom of the Press

IT IS INTERESTING to follow Hugh Hewitt’s interview (perm) of Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial board member Elizabeth Sullivan. Sullivan had published an article supporting the New York Times’s outing of the Bush Administration’s program to track down terrorist financing. So Hewitt got to do another of his forensic interviews, the kind in which he manages to show that the MSM journalist in question doesn’t have much “there” there.

HH: [The New York Times] named three specific, they named three specific cases where SWIFT had led to the arrest of terrorists. Those three, then, can be reversed engineered by the associates of those individuals. That's...those are three specific cases. But more broadly, what this FBI, Lormel man is saying is that when you tell and broadcast, you alert the less smart, the less sophisticated...

ES: The...it is, I think, not persuasive in this case. Not persuasive to me that that's the case.

Elizabeth Sullivan basically argues that the media should be the judge of whether to publicize a classified program, and that they should not be accountable for making a mistake.

I just don’t think that the American people are going to like that. The whole point of freedom is that it is not a license to do anything you want without accountability, but that it gives you freedom from prior restraint. But if you make a mistake, if you harm someone, then you should pay the piper.

The reason that we have a legal system is precisely to judge contested actions. Did the government judge correctly that the use of SWIFT for tracking down terrorists was appropriately secret? Is the New York Times correct in saying that its revelation of the classified program does not materially harm the nation’s ability to track down terrorists? Let’s try the facts and the law and find out.

And the MSM is arguing that because they are special, because they are important, they should not be accountable for their actions.