The AP and the Justice Department

I'm leery of government interference with the press doing its job.  Of course, today I'm worried about the press actually doing its job absent government interference.

There are three sets of actions taken by members of the executive branch of our government that are being called scandals right now: the deaths of Americans in Benghazi last year, the unequal targeting of right wing groups by the IRS, and the Justice Department secretly obtaining communications records from the Associated Press.  Of the three, only the last is remotely a scandal.

The first is at best a turf battle amongst bureaucracies.  The second is a story of a few players acting wrongly and those above them actually shutting down that wrong-doing once it came to light, exercising oversight of their own domains.  (And I am not claiming that mistakes were not made or that government in this case could not operate better on behalf of the people.  I am simply saying that there is no scandal present.  Only politics can generate a scandal from either of these sets of events.)  The third, however, deserves the greatest scrutiny.  There is no greater bedrock of what America truly should be than the concept of freedom of the press.

With this in mind, I recommend a column in the Washington Post by veteran national security reporter Walter Pincus.  It puts into context the actions of government officials and the members of the press.  There were on-going, real-world events that were affected by the leaks in question.  The question for us as a society is whether stemming those leaks rises above the threshold of necessity for the government to interfere with the press.

Often, that is an easy call to make.  It isn't here.

21 May 2013


Addition:  I've read two other pieces on this topic today that are worth your time. The first is by Jack Shafer at Reuters.  Expanding on it is a piece at TPM by Josh Marshall.

Addition 2: Second post by Marshall at TPM.

22 May 2013 Addition:  I'm going to highlight two more posts.  One on the general response by the press to this issue and the second putting these responses in context.