I'm not going to make you read it all, but I thought this was a very good article in Sunday's WaPo concerning the watchdog status of the press.
here
It is the business -- and the responsibility -- of the press to reveal secrets. Journalists are constantly trying to report things that public officials and others believe should be secret, and constantly exercising restraint over what they publish.
If they don't do it, 'One Pissed Off Liberal' or 'McJoan', or 'Kos' or some other Kossak will have to do it.
Then everyone will know.
It is appropriate for Americans to be concerned when news organizations publish information that the president and others in authority have strongly urged not be published. No sane citizen would wish the media to provide terrorists with information that would be likely to endanger Americans.
And no sane citizen wants their government wiretapping their phones and datamining their bank records.
President Bush has denounced the Times in exceptionally harsh language, and on June 29 the House formally condemned the paper. Some critics of the Times have termed its actions "treasonous" and called for criminal charges under the Espionage Act. One conservative commentator told the San Francisco Chronicle that she would happily send Bill Keller, the paper's executive editor, to the gas chamber.
Because the Wall Street Journal is our friend, and we are loyal hypocrits if nothing else.
Earlier this year, a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 56 percent of respondents said it was very important for the media to report stories they believe are in the nation's interest. A third of respondents ranked government censorship on the grounds of national security as more important.
56% of those polled were democrats, and that other third he mentioned were the backwash "we're behind ya all the way George" republicans.
For many Americans, however, the possibility of damage to terrorist surveillance should have been sufficient justification for the Times to remain silent. Why, they ask, should the press take such a chance?
There are situations in which that chance should not be taken. For instance, there was no justification for columnist Robert D. Novak to have unmasked Valerie Plame as a covert CIA officer.
There it is!! I've been waiting for someone other than the "stuck in reality" liberal lefty blogosphere to print that.
We know from history that the government often claims to be concerned about national security when its concern is that disclosure will prove politically or personally embarrassing. The documents that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers in 1971 told how Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson had misled Americans about our role in the Vietnam War. Hence the classification of their contents.
A new reality show -- "History Repeats Itself" -- brought to you by the folks currently raping our treasury.
Bush's reaction -- declaring a "war on terror" and claiming the Constitution grants almost limitless powers to the president in a time of war -- is excessive.
Ya think? It's been almost 5 years since 9-11 and the MSM is finally fed up with this?
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has said he would consider prosecuting journalists for publishing classified information.
No! He wouldn't do that, would he? Isn't this still the "land of the free (press)"?
Carl C. Magee, a crusading journalist whose Albuquerque newspaper infuriated another president in the 1920s with revelations in the Teapot Dome scandal. Forced to close his paper after being driven to bankruptcy, Magee emerged two months later with another newspaper.
Emblazoned on the front page was a new motto, borrowed from Dante: Give Light and the People Will Find Their Own Way.
Give that light to Diogenes, he's probably still looking.