'Some Blogger or Counterculture Ideologue'
An interesting bit of press history appears on the op-ed page of today's Washington Post. Michael Berlin, who formerly covered the U.N. for the Post, explains how he and other reporters "got hold of a dynamite news story" in 1979: that Canadian diplomats in Tehran were sheltering several Americans from the then-new terror regime in Iran, which was holding several dozen Americans hostage.
The reporters withheld the story, for the obvious reason that it "could put the lives of the fugitive Americans and their Canadian hosts in danger," until January 1980, when the Americans escaped Iran with the help of the CIA. Berlin writes:
Do I regret not getting my scoop on the hostage story? Not a bit. Over the years, I've run into dozens of reporters who had a piece of the story before it broke, including those who covered the State Department for The Washington Post, and they all felt the same way.
The Canada-hostage story proves that reporters and news organizations can be trusted, en masse, to make the right call on security information they uncover. And neither Iranian officials nor Iranian news media got wind of it.
Do I think that a thousand reporters could be trusted today to make the same call that we did in 1979? I wonder. Even back then, there was the fear that some rogue reporter would ignore the pleas and go with the story. In today's journalism world, I fear that some blogger or counterculture ideologue using journalism as a political tool rather than as a mechanism for dispensing straight information, would make the wrong call. I hope I'm wrong about that.
But as we noted in May(http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110008452), the publisher of the New York Times is a counterculture ideologue. Does anyone really have confidence that he and his staffers are not "using journalism as a political tool"?
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