All the News that's Fit to Print

Jonathan Schwartz has been reading James Risen's book (Risen is one of the two NY Times reporters to have broken the domestic surveillance story). He informs those of us who haven't yet gotten to it that one of Risen's stories relates to the "Downing Street Memos." In particular, Risen tells us for the first time that the conclusion in that memo that the US had made the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2002 and was "fixing" the intelligence around that decision came after the author of the memo had met with George Tenet.

Schwartz then goes on to say:

But the most puzzling issue may be this: what on earth makes the New York Times just sit on this kind of information? In fact, the NSA wiretapping story and this Downing Street Memo background is still only part of it. As various outlets have reported, State of War also reveals that the CIA sent thirty relatives of Iraqi scientists to Iraq to ask them whether they were working on WMD programs. Every single relative reported back that the scientists said they weren't, and that Iraq had nothing. Not a word of this has appeared in the Times.

And it doesn't seem to be because Risen wasn't trying. The New York Observer has reported that:

...according to current and former Times sources familiar with the Washington bureau, Mr. Risen was gathering reporting from sources in the prewar period that cast a skeptical light on Saddam Hussein’s alleged W.M.D. stockpiles, but either couldn’t get his stories in the paper or else found them buried on the inside pages.

In the end, it seems clear the New York Times subscribes to Katherine Graham's philosophy, famously expressed in a speech at the CIA:

We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.

From the Times' perspective, there are some things we members of the great unwashed simply don't need to know.

A hat tip to Kevin Drum.