All In A Day's Work to Betray Intelligence Assets

The declassification by the New York Times of the secret US program to monitor terrorist financial transactions seems to be perking along nicely. Hopefully, we are going to find that the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, the newspapers that declassified the secret program, seriously misjudged the national mood.

Hugh Hewitt has a telling point on the two newspapers. The two editors just don’t know much about the world except the lefty elite echo chambers in which they have worked pretty well all their lives.

The trouble with folks like Keller and McManus making these decisions is that they just don't know much about things other than newspapers... Between the two we get about 70 years of work exclusively inside of newspapers, and the vast majority of that within two ultra-liberal newspapers... [N]either has worked in government or even in any place of business other than newspapers. They are creatures of the MSM, through and through.

What they have done is lived in that thin world of liberal condescension, one that thinks itself rather above the grubby nationalism of the average American. In that rarified air, people don’t really have contact with the real world.

Hewitt acquitted himself well on CNN with Geneva Overholzer, pointing out that the media does not have exemption from the laws of the land. The First Amendment says that there cannot be prior restraint on publication. But not that newspapers can publish anything they want. Overholzer has the curious idea that the media “challenge power.”

The media in this country have always been at their strongest when they do challenge power.

Oh yes? When has the media ever challenged power? When has it ever done anything more than run with the hare and hunt with the hounds?

The fact is that the media spend 95 percent of their time sucking up to their sources (i.e., power) and 5 percent burning their sources when there is blood in the water.

You won’t find the media challenging the real institutional power in this country. Like the AARP. Like the plaintiff bar. Like the teachers’ unions.

And the question still is: Who is betraying national security secrets to the New York Times?