Don't Expect Responsible Behavior from the Press

The newspapers, of course, said no. Why? What could outweigh the need to protect a valid effort to shield Americans from additional, barbarous attacks? Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, smugly decreed that the Bush administration’s “access to this vast repository of international financial data” was, in his singularly impeccable judgment, “a matter of public interest.”

And you probably thought George Bush was the imperious one. And that the public’s principal interest was in remaining alive. Wrong again.

Andrew C. McCarthy on the decision by The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times to run the story on U.S. surveillance of possible terrorist financial transactions.

The irresponsible conduct of the press no longer surprises me. I'm seriously working to resist the conclusion that The New York Times would prefer, for whatever strange reasons, an American loss in Iraq.