Okay, I admit it. As a reporter, I've withheld information from the public. I've actually done so quite often and will continue to do so in the future.
The subject of when the media should disclose information came to light this week in two separate circumstances. First, the revelation that Prince Harry was fighting with U.K. forces against the Taliban in Afghanistan and, second, that the New York Times put out a story suggesting that John McCain might not be eligible to run for president because he was born outside of the United States.
Those two highlight the main reasons why news outlets don't necessarily pass along everything they learn.
-- Airing a story might prove to be recklessly dangerous, or,
-- making a judgment call on whether a story is relevant and pertinent.
Let's take the dangerous scenario first. A thumbnail sketch of what took place: the British media agreed to not publicize the prince's deployment until after he returned home, in exchange for almost unprecedented access to his activities for embedded reporters. The cover was blown this week by an item on the Drudge Report, and Harry is being shipped home for his own safety. The danger of militants knowing he is there is obvious. However, there's a debate raging over whether the British media should have accepted such a deal and whether it was right for Matt Drudge to blow it.
This is not an unusual subject, however, and it runs the gamut from the national media to local reporters. Remember how the Bush administration fought desperately but unsuccessfully to prevent publication of a story that revealed how the Treasury Department tracked international exchanges of money in its terror financing probes. That was a security issue for all of us.
Me, on the local level, well I'm often asked to not reveal a name of someone who might be a cooperating witness in a court case involving criminal street gangs. If the prosecutor, or the witnesses' lawyer, can give me legitimate explanation for how the witness has been threatened, then I won't reveal the name. In exchange, I build trust with an official who is more likely in the future to give me information that will prove beneficial to my readers, probably more so than simply putting out a name.
Considering whether a story is newsworthy, and how to present it, is an issue that's bedeviled The New York Times in the past week in two articles about McCain, including the most recent about whether he is in fact eligible to run for president.
McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone while his father was stationed there. He was born in a military hospital. A military installation in a foreign land, like an embassy, is considered U.S. soil. Therefore, McCain is a "natural born" citizen as specified by the Constitution and is therefore eligible to become president. There's no question about it. Americans born in civilian areas of the Panama Canal Zone may not have been so lucky, I understand, but that's not the issue with McCain.
So the story is neither relevant nor pertinent, and should not have been run the way it was, especially following the previous piece on McCain -- on his alleged relationship with a female lobbyist -- that turned into a disaster for the newspaper. The circumstances of McCain's birth are curious, though, and could have been an interesting sidebar snippet that does not leave his candidacy an open question.
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News today is that overall advertising in the New York Times dropped more than 11 percent in January, led by a 22.6 percent drop in classified ads, a paper's lifeblood. Large shareholders are revolting because the New York Times Company has lost more than half of its share price in five years and isn't doing much to find new Internet-generated revenues (though few newspapers are finding the Web to be a money-maker).
The Times Company also includes the International Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe (which when I viewed it in 2003 appeared to me to be the worst big-city newspaper I'd ever seen), and About.com, which is actually quite useful and from which I'm learning at my ripe middle-age to play guitar -- on a very, very, very basic level. But you gotta make money from it.
It's easy to dump on The New York Times. The people who run the paper make themselves appear unbelievably silly sometimes. But what is happening to them is happening to newspapers across the United States, and the business of journalism is much worse off for it, as is the ability of consumers to get the daily information they need so they can lead productive lives.
