Press Intimidation after 9/11: NYT suppression of Bush warrantless surveillance until after Election

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: Intimidating the Press
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, April 3, 2008

It's a case study in how the Bush administration intimidated the press after 9/11.

The publication of a new book by Eric Lichtblau, one of the two New York Times reporters who in late 2005 broke the story of the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program, is calling attention to how the White House successfully persuaded the Times to suppress its expose in the fall of 2004 -- when it might have had a profound effect on President Bush's reelection hopes.

In an interview with Terry Gross that aired yesterday on NPR, Lichtblau spoke about the paper's decision.

"Why didn't it run then?" Gross asked.

Lichtblau: "Well, this was obviously a decision made by the top editors at the paper, and I think it was a very tough one. I think you got to remember, these were somewhat different times for the media in 2004. We were only, at that point, a couple of years after 9/11. I'm not sure, in hindsight, there were many newspapers that would've gone ahead and published that story, given the intense, intense pressure and the claims that were made by the White House. Our reporting had shown a lot of things about the cracks in the program, about the concerns about the legal foundations. The White House was armed and ready to refute every single one of those with what, in hindsight, turned out to be, I believe, misstatements about how every lawyer at the Justice Department, for instance, had found this program to be legal. We certainly know that now in hindsight not to be true.

"But, you know, in 2004, those were difficult things for the newspaper to refute; and we had the White House, at the highest levels, insisting that this program would harm national security were we to write about it. And I think the concern from the editors--and I didn't necessarily agree, you know, I pushed for publication, I don't think that's any secret. The concern from the editors was would we be merely outing an operational program that was on a firm legal foundation, and they made the decision that we could not do that at that point."

But is there a happy ending here? Did the Times's decision to run the piece in 2005 -- even after a personal warning from Bush that it would be responsible for the next terrorist attack -- signify the end of a period of fear and intimidation?

In an excerpt from his new book " Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice" published in Slate last week, Lichtblau writes about the terrified, credulous environment in the nation's top newsrooms that lasted for several years after the 9/11 attacks that the White House was able to exploit. He writes that "a healthy, essential skepticism . . . was missing from much of the media's early reporting after 9/11, both at home in the administration's war on terror and abroad in the run-up to the war in Iraq."

The 2005 decision to publish the story, by contrast, reflected "the media's shifting attitudes toward matters of national security--from believing the government to believing it less," Lichtblau writes. But he also indicates that a major factor in that decision was that his co-author, James Risen, had announced that he was going to expose the program in his own book....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2008/04/03/BL2008040302203_pf.html

[UpInArms]

1. The New Whorek Times is such piece of shit

from putting every lie that the criminal Judith Miller penned above the fold to promote the illegal war of the neocons to abdicating every responsibility to good journalism - glad to see this coming out - and that the only reason that the story went to press with them was they didn't want to get "scooped".

They make me :puke:

[creeksneakers2]

2. I don't buy blaming the mood after 9/11.

The right wing controlled the media all through the Clinton presidency and threw the 2000 election to Bush. All of Bush's fault were covered up from day one. 9/11 just gave the media an excuse to promote even more right wing propaganda.

"A few years?" To this day the media still isn't telling anywhere near all the truth. What improvement that has come was brought about by public awareness that there were no WMD, Iraq wasn't at all what we were told it would be, the economy was based on fraud and the president is an idiot. Now the media wants to use 9/11 as an excuse.

[DeepModem Mom]

3. An interesting take on this, creek -- thanks for the post. nt