At The New York Times, a Sudden Appreciation for Media Censorship with Greenwald

Michael Kinsley, an editor
known for his work at The New Republic, the Los
Angeles Times, Crossfire, and for helping found
Slate, was handed the
high-profile task of penning the New York Times
review of Glenn Greenwald’s book about the Edward
Snowden affair, No Place to Hide.

Kinsley does not appear to be a fan of Greenwald’s somewhat
grandiose personality and sense of self-importance, and there’s
certainly room to judge him for such flaws. But those traits are
also fairly common in prominent media figures. Kinsley points out
that for all of Greenwald’s complaining about the media kowtowing
to government requests to withhold information from Edward
Snowden’s documents, Greenwald certainly hasn’t been prevented from
providing this information and the public hasn’t been denied the
chance to hear about it.

But then Kinsley turns around and justifies all of Greenwald’s
fears, arguing that some sort of authority figure should have some
sort of control or oversight over what sort of leaks the press
should be allowed to publish. In some analysis that is getting a
bit of
attention (and not of the positive kind), Kinsley writes:

The question is who decides. It seems clear, at least to me,
that the private companies that own newspapers, and their
employees, should not have the final say over the release of
government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no
legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace Greenwald,
we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the
government. No doubt the government will usually be overprotective
of its secrets, and so the process of decision-making—whatever it
turns out to be—should openly tilt in favor of publication with
minimal delay. But ultimately you can’t square this circle. Someone
gets to decide, and that someone cannot be Glenn Greenwald.

In a democracy, the decision on whether to release secret
information showing illegal or corrupt behavior by the government
should ultimately be made by the government? What does
that even mean? Several paragraphs before, Kinsley acknowledged
that Snowden’s leaks were a valid exposure of bad behavior by the
National Security Agency (NSA). He even calls the NSA’s actions
“lawbreaking.”

And it wasn’t actually Glenn Greenwald who decided.
The first person to decide that the information should be published
was Edward Snowden, and the United States government is trying to
put him in prison for providing information Kinsley himself thinks
should have been made public. Snowden chose Greenwald to receive
the information.

Kinsley seems to think there’s a piece missing in the checks and
balances of revealing government misbehavior. He concludes his
review:

As the news media struggles to expose government secrets and the
government struggles to keep them secret, there is no invisible
hand to assure that the right balance is struck. So what do we do
about leaks of government information? Lock up the perpetrators or
give them the Pulitzer Prize? (The Pulitzer people chose the second
option.) This is not a straightforward or easy question. But I
can’t see how we can have a policy that authorizes newspapers and
reporters to chase down and publish any national security leaks
they can find. This isn’t Easter and these are not eggs.

My response: The free press and freedom from government prior
restraint is the check and balance here. We don’t have a
“policy” that authorizes the media to publish leaks. We have a
constitutional right to do so, and it horrifies me to
see an editor who thinks that the First Amendment is some sort of
government “policy” and not a carefully worded restriction of
government authority. Greenwald is the balance.The
existence of a media able to publish whatever information it can
get its ink-stained hands on is intended to discourage a secretive
government.

If the government doesn’t want people leaking what it’s doing,
the solution is actually pretty simple: Don’t be the kind of
government that secretly does the kind of things that horrify your
own citizens to the point that they’re willing to risk prison and
flee to horrible countries to expose to the public what the
government is doing. To believe that the lesson from the Snowden
affair is more government authority over the media—even after
agreeing that Snowden’s fears were legitimate—is simply
embarrassing.