Imagine NYT’s Public Editor Behaving Like Bill Keller, or an Ombudsman

Imagine NYT’s Public Editor behaving like Bill Keller, or even like an ombudsman. Keep imagining. It’s not going to happen with house tabby, so-called Public Editor, Byron Calame in the NYT’s editors’ laps. The pompousness of his title Public Editor, in place of ombudsman for the readers, is evident in Calame editing out the readers and acting as ventriloquist’s puppet for the NYT’s editors.

Calame defends the NYT’s publishing details of the SWIFT program in his column, “Secrecy, Security, the President and the Press.” Calame merely meows the house line.

His arguments are even weaker for their evident self-contradictions and failure to consider contrary evidence. For examples:

Calame starts off with,

Roughly 1,000 e-mails have come to me, about 85 percent of them critical of the decision to publish the story and a large fraction venomous. It was time to take a close look at the handling of the article in search of answers.

But, he doesn’t respond to that expressed reader outrage by providing any details of who the informants to the NYT’s are or whether their legal obligations to not reveal secrets is of any import. This considerable body of the NYT’s constituency demand accountability by the NYT’s – as do the 60% of Americans polled who say “the Times did more to help terrorist groups than the public (27 percent)… Furthermore, almost all (87 percent) think the employees who leaked should face criminal charges and two-thirds think the news organizations should.” – but that is overridden or ignored by Calame and the NYT’s defense argument that the NYT’s should be unilateral and enjoy secrecy about its own methods of data collection in its decisions to publish national security secrets.

Most strikingly missing is that by Calame’s logic his role as Public Editor investigating the workings of his paper could have argued the NYT’s sources be revealed in the public interest or for the public’s right to know or that a newspaper’s revealing secrets without vigorous outside oversight is rightfully suspect or that illegality should be exposed. Those are his arguments for the NYT’s revealing details of the government’s SWIFT program.

If the press are a fourth estate with obligations, as Calame echoes Keller, to "Our default position — our job — is to publish information if we are convinced it is fair and accurate…The question we start with as journalists is not 'why publish?' but 'why would we withhold information of significance?'," then the public’s “default position” is to expect to be secure from physical harm by our nation’s enemies who have demonstrated their determination to impose such physical harm, and the government’s “default position” is to defend the public’s security by reasonable means including legitimate secrecy of those means.

A la the insulated and ignorant comment that George Bush can’t have been legitimately elected since no one the commenter knew voted for him, Calame repeats Keller’s line that "Hundreds, if not thousands, of people know about this."

However, there is no evidence that many or most terrorists either knew about the program or that revealing the program’s details wouldn’t make their evasion efforts greater or more effective. Calame’s narrow source for supporting that the program’s details were widely known is only referring to the “25 bankers from numerous nations on the Swift board of directors, and their predecessors going back to 2001… So did some consortium executives and staff members — a group that probably expanded during this period,” and “a 2002 United Nations report noting that the United States was monitoring international financial transactions. Swift and similar organizations were mentioned in the publicly available report, although there were no details,” and a comment from a former “State Department official” that "the information was fairly well known by terrorism financing experts back in 2002."

Then, Calame today parrots the NYT’s line, “So far, Swift hasn't publicly indicated any intention to stop cooperating.” However, Calame neglects to mention that the NYT’s exposure of the program’s details is leading to just such hesitancy or opposition to cooperating. As Ed Morrissey has pointed out with respect to Canada and Europe, “exposure has created pressure on those people who cooperated with American intel agencies to track those transactions.” (See UPDATE)

Lastly, one sees Calame’s puppet lips assert the import of oversight, citing “the skimpy Congressional oversight of the program,” as the NYT’s mission to reveal its details. Yet, that Congressionally selected number of members is who is authorized to have details of such a secret program, and even the NYT’s doesn’t argue that there is anything illegal or unauthorized with the program. Except by arrogant self-appointment, the NYT’s is not on that list of those authorized or with need to know.

This again demonstrates the failure of newspaper ombudsmen to really investigate their papers’ behavior, and meet their responsibility to the public rather than their guild or paymasters.

UPDATE: See here for the EU Parliament and Belgium reacting, and here for Privacy International complaints to EU members.