A profound ethical dilemma that national journalists occasionally face, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, is: When is it right to protect government secrets, and when should those secrets be revealed to the public? How must editors weigh such decisions when national security bumps up against citizens’ need for information?
In 2006, Dean Baquet, then editor of the Los Angeles Times, and Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, wrestled with these questions in a coauthored editorial:
Finally, we weigh the merits of publishing against the risks of publishing. There is no magic formula. … We make our best judgment.
When we come down on the side of publishing, of course, everyone hears about it. Few people are aware when we decide to hold an article. But each of us, in the past few years, has had the experience of withholding or delaying articles when the administration convinces us that the risk of publication outweighed the benefits. …
We understand that honorable people may disagree … to publish or not to publish. But making those decisions is a responsibility that falls to editors, a corollary to the great gift of our independence. It is not a responsibility we take lightly. And it is not one we can surrender to the government.19
What makes the predicament of these national editors so tricky is that in the war against terrorism, some politicians claimed that one value terrorists truly hate is “our freedom”; yet what is more integral to liberty than the freedom of an independent press—so independent that for more than two hundred years U.S. courts have protected the news media’s right to criticize our political leaders and, within boundaries, reveal government secrets?