It must rank as one of the most awkward editorial conclaves ever held. On December 5, three senior personnel from The New York Times were summoned to the Oval Office by George W Bush to discuss an investigation the newspaper was conducting on surveillance of United States citizens.
According to Newsweek magazine, which first reported the gathering, the president called in the publisher of The New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jnr; the executive editor, Bill Keller; and the Washington bureau chief, Philip Taubman, with the express purpose of persuading them not to publish a story that he had authorised surveillance of US citizens without court oversight — a story it had already sat on for a year.
Last week, The Washington Post‘s media column revealed that the Post‘s editor, Leonard Downie Jnr, was also summoned to the Oval Office before publication of its story that the CIA was running secret detention centres in Eastern Europe. In both instances, the stated motive for the meeting was national security, and the Post and the Times were warned that publication could damage the national interest.
Bush does not seem to have made his case very well. The Post story appeared on November 2. The Times story on the warrantless phone taps was published on December 16. ”After listening respectfully to the administration’s objections, we were convinced there was no good reason not to publish it,” Keller said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times.
Media commentators say that, following the attacks on the World Trade Centre, news organisations were reluctant to challenge the White House on national security. ”September 11 really knocked a lot of people for a huge loop in this country, and the Bush administration was able to use that in a way that made political opposition seem unpatriotic,” says Michael Tomasky, executive editor of the American Prospect.
Four years on, there is less pressure on news organisations to demonstrate patriotism, but Tomasky claims public institutions such as the Times are constrained by intense scrutiny from right-wing blogs. ”The major papers are far more intimidated than they need to be by this administration, and by what we call in this country the conservative echo chamber.”
The frequency with which Bush has personally sought to frame coverage, and the degree to which such encounters affect decisions on what should be published, remains unclear. Neither newspaper initially disclosed the summons to the White House. But, both admitted making some concessions to administration officials.
In its lengthy investigation of the wiretaps by the National Security Agency (NSA), the Times admitted that it had held off publishing for more than a year. There has been speculation that it was forced to publish to avoid the embarrassment of being scooped by the release of a book by reporter James Risen that contains information from his long-delayed story on the NSA.
The Post, meanwhile, admitted that it withheld the location of the secret prisons at the administration’s request. The locations — in Romania and Poland — were disclosed 24 hours later by The Financial Times.
With neither the Post nor The New York Times was forthcoming about details of their discussions at the White House — both claim the sit-downs with Bush were off the record — questions have been asked about coverage of an administration that is extremely secretive, and more determined than any in recent memory to impose its own version of events on the public. — Â