by Brent Baker
With President Bush properly berating Congress for the leak at least one member made last week, just before the war was launched, of classified information, it's heartening to learn that many members of the media have acted responsibly in the past few weeks and withheld military operational news of which they had learned.
The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz noted that 17 news organizations knew on Friday, when their staffers were called to join the military media pool, that an attack was imminent, but none divulged the development.
Even more laudatory, more than a week before USA Today ran a front page story about how the U.S. had Green Beret and Navy SEAL commandos inside Afghanistan, Knight-Ridder had the story. But out of concern for endangering the servicemen and the operation, Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau Chief Clark Hoyt withheld the story, the editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press disclosed this past Sunday.
An excerpt of Kurtz's October 9 Washington Post story:
Seventeen news organizations knew Friday that the U.S. attack on Afghanistan was imminent when the Pentagon summoned their reporters for aircraft carrier duty.
There was an implicit understanding that the journalists would keep it quiet — and no one spilled the beans….
Douglas Jehl of the New York Times, Steve Vogel of the Washington Post, Yarislov Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal, Bill Glauber of the Baltimore Sun, Walter Rodgers of CNN and Jeffrey Kofman of ABC were among those dispatched to the USS Carl Vinson in the North Arabian Sea, where F-18 and F-14 warplanes launched bombing raids against Afghan targets Sunday….
The more than 40 journalists summoned by the Pentagon also came from NBC, CBS, Fox, the Associated Press, Reuters, Time, Sky News, Bahrain television, the Times of London, Black Star and Britain's ITN. Some were “embedded” (to use the military's term) on the USS Enterprise, as well as a guided-missile cruiser and a guided-missile destroyer.
Media organizations, for their part, aren't satisfied. “It was a good start to get us on board those ships,” said Robin Sproul, ABC's Washington bureau chief. “But we're very interested in getting access to U.S. troops wherever they are.”…
To read Kurtz's story in full, go here.
An excerpt from the October 7 St. Paul Pioneer Press column by the Knight-Ridder-owned paper's editor, Walter Lundy:
…Nothing is more painful for a journalist than to be scooped. It's even more embarrassing when you had the story first but decided to hold it.
That's what happened to our Knight Ridder Washington Bureau nine days ago on an international exclusive about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
On Sept. 28, USA Today revealed that Green Berets and Navy SEAL teams had been inside Afghanistan for two weeks looking for the terrorist.
The newspaper published the story, it explained, because newspapers in Pakistan already had reported it.
The Knight Ridder Washington bureau, which serves the Pioneer Press and 31 other newspapers with a staff of 40, had also known about the ground troops, too, for more than a week.
When the USA Today story broke, Pulitzer Prize winner Clark Hoyt, the bureau's top editor, e-mailed his unhappy client-editors to explain why we were scooped. Since Sept. 11, Hoyt has been coordinating Knight Ridder's coverage of the U.S. response with
eight reporters and three photographers in seven countries, including Afghanistan. You have read many of their exclusive reports in our paper.Hoyt wrote, “Within days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, we confirmed to our satisfaction that some small units of U.S. special operations forces had entered Afghanistan and were trying to locate bin Laden. “When we sought Pentagon comment, we were asked not to publish the story on the grounds that it could endanger the lives of the servicemen involved and compromise any chances of success.
“(We editors) had a conversation about it, not really a very long one, and decided not to publish.
“Based on what we knew, we believed that making [the operation] public could have substantially increased the risk to the Americans involved and could even have been seen as contributing to a loss of life. We believe you [editors] probably would have reached the same conclusion.”
He's right. We are loath to keep anything from our readers but when people's lives are at stake, what's to debate? You wait….
To read Lundy's piece in full, go here.
Hoyt deserves appreciation for being an America citizen first and a journalist second.
(This update courtesy of the Media Research Center.)
