go 'head, nyt and lat!

'LAT' and 'NYT' Carry Unusual Joint Op-Ed By Their Editors

NEW YORK Capping a week of controversy and angry words, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times -- often considered national news rivals -- took the extraordinary step Saturday of publishing a joint op-ed piece written by their top editors, Dean Baquet and Bill Keller, respectively.

The New York paper, and then the L.A. Times, published revealing articles about the secret banking records surveillance program last week, and have been hammered by Republicans in Washington, D.C. (from the president on down) and other conservatives ever since. The Wall Street Journal published a similar story but today it's editorial page chose to attack The New York Times for refusing to heed the administraton's request to kill its article.

But Baquet and Keller, in their op-ed, stuck to their guns. Both papers headlined the piece: "When do we publish a secret?" The L.A. Times' deck reads, "How the press balances national security with its mission to report the news."

The column repeats much of what Baquet and Keller had written in their papers or on their Web sites earlier this week, but also holds new points. One paragraph that jumps out is this one:

"Government officials, understandably, want it both ways. They want us to protect their secrets, and they want us to trumpet their successes. A few days ago, Treasury Secretary John Snow said he was scandalized by our decision to report on the bank-monitoring program. But in September 2003 the same Secretary Snow invited a group of reporters from our papers, The Wall Street Journal and others to travel with him and his aides on a military aircraft for a six-day tour to show off the department's efforts to track terrorist financing. The secretary's team discussed many sensitive details of their monitoring efforts, hoping they would appear in print and demonstrate the administration's relentlessness against the terrorist threat."

The column closes on this note:

"It is not always a matter of publishing an article or killing it. Sometimes we deal with the security concerns by editing out gratuitous detail that lends little to public understanding but might be useful to the targets of surveillance. The Washington Post, at the administration's request, agreed not to name the specific countries that had secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons, deeming that information not essential for American readers. The New York Times, in its article on National Security Agency eavesdropping, left out some technical details.

"Even the banking articles, which the president and vice president have condemned, did not dwell on the operational or technical aspects of the program, but on its sweep, the questions about its legal basis and the issues of oversight.

"We understand that honorable people may disagree with any of these choices — to publish or not to publish. But making those decisions is the 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."

By E&P Staff
Published: June 30, 2006 11:55 PM ET
picture: Dean Baquet