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by Ken Harris
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
A Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for The New York Times said Tuesday at the University of Wisconsin the media did not do its job in wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by failing to question the government’s handling of the situation.
Eric Lichtblau, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the National Security Agency’s illegal wiretapping program, told a group of students, faculty and community members the news media got caught up in the climate of fear and revenge leading to the Iraq war.
“We weren’t asking the questions early on we should have been,” Lichtblau said. “There was a whole mood in the country of just revulsion over what had happened and the determination to stop this from ever happening again.”
According to Lichtblau, the role of the media is to be skeptical of the information it receives and to investigate to make sure it is accurate. However, he said following Sept. 11 “that skepticism kind of abandoned us.”
Lichtblau added the media did not start asking the hard-hitting questions until after the United States had invaded Iraq. It was only then that they started to break stories like the prisoner torture at Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay.
According to Lichtblau, it was at about this time he began investigating the NSA’s wiretapping operations that allowed the agency to get intelligence on Americans’ international communications.
Lichtblau said the White House begged his bosses, the editors of The New York Times, “not to run the story, based on the idea it would do irreparable harm to national security, because al Qaeda did not know we were listening to their phone calls and reading their e-mails.”
The New York Times editors made the difficult decision not to print the story, and it was killed, according to Lichtblau. He added the story did not run for more than a year, until the Times decided to run it in December 2005.
Lichtblau said the editors weighed the balance between the public’s right to know and national security and eventually “came down on the side of the public’s right to know.”
According to Lichtblau, the Times was attacked by conservatives for running the story, as well as by liberals for holding the story during the 2004 presidential elections, saying it would have caused George W. Bush to lose.
Lichtblau defended the Times’ decision to ultimately run the story, saying “This was sort of the press at its best,” adding it is “the role of the press as a watchdog.”
One audience member accused the Times of being biased in its new coverage, saying Lichtblau’s opinions were coming from a liberal point of view.
“While that’s certainly our reputation, I think that’s mostly from our opinion pages, which are certainly liberal,” Lichtblau said. “I think in our news pages there is just as much to piss off liberals as there are conservatives.”
UW journalism professor Robert Drechsel said he agreed with Lichtblau’s assertion that the media failed to do its job in the wake of Sept. 11 by failing to ask questions.
“I think the media absolutely dropped the ball on 9/11, and I think it persisted, unfortunately, all the way through the decision to go to war in Iraq and even after that,” Drechsel said. “Only recently is it really coming back into balance, and I think that, frankly, the country has paid an enormous price for it.”
Anonymous (April 9, 2008 @ 10:49pm):
If the NYT pulled the same crap in WW II as they do now the USA would have lost.
I can see them deciding that the "public's right to know" meant that the NYT should publish D-Day invasion details on June 5. Troop ship departures would be on the front page - so that Code Pink could send demonstrators. Manhattan Project secrecy, forgetaboutit!
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