Keller Answers Question: Why did the NYT sit on the NSA story?

[Rose Siding]

snip>
Q. I'd like to know why you sat on the NSA story. You probably changed the course of an election and likely history to come.

A.....When we first approached the Bush administration for comment on our story, the administration made an urgent plea that we not publish our information on national security grounds. It's rare that the government makes a concerted, top-level appeal to hold a story (I can think of only four or five instances in my 19 years as an editor) and it's even more rare that we agree. But we take such appeals seriously. We gave senior officials an opportunity to make their case. They laid out a detailed argument that publishing what we then knew would compromise ongoing anti-terror operations, and they challenged our reporting on the issue of whether the eavesdropping program was subject to serious oversight by the courts or Congress. Their arguments were compelling enough that we felt the responsible course was to hold the story and do further reporting.

Jim and Eric then did what good reporters do: they dug some more, and made the story stronger. Their subsequent reporting, to my mind, convincingly knocked down both of the administration objections. They established that there had been serious misgivings within the government about the civil liberties aspects of the NSA program -- at senior levels of the executive, judicial and legislative branches. Their reporting also yielded additional information about the program that gave the paper a more complete picture of how it was carried out. Jim and Eric then reworked the story into a version that, we were confident, would not provide useful information to terrorists who were the targets of the eavesdropping program.

Whether publishing earlier would have influenced the 2004 election is, I think, hard to say. Judging from the public reaction to the NSA eavesdropping reflected in various polls, one could ask whether earlier disclosure might have helped President Bush more than hurt. I don't know. But the sole test of when we publish a story is not whether it will influence a political outcome. The test is whether the story is ready and up to our standards.

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/media/asktheeditors.html

[marylanddem]

1. "up to our standards" - that's tongue-in-cheek, right, Bill?

[Jim Sagle]

2. Yeah - his tonque in w's asscheek.

:puke: