Excusing Institutional Biases

Jeff Goldstein on the White House push-back against journalists using illegal leaks I posted about earlier today:

The press has, on the whole, been relying on a powerful emotional appeal—“the public’s right to know”—to excuse institutional biases that have become increasingly obvious to even the most casual of observers; and over the last generation in particular, that blanket appeal has been used as an all-purpose defense for a culture of leaks and counter leaks that have become all too common inside the beltway, and, when joined to the ideological bent of a mainstream media that is happy to oblige with a particular agenda-driven framing, has had the practical effect of providing undue influence to those who have disagreements with the party in power.
But just because such a dynamic has, by force of habit, become the way business gets done in Washington, doesn’t mean it should get done in such a way. And it is clear, at least to me, that there is a substantive difference between on the one hand, having a healthy distrust of the government, and on the other, allowing those partisans who disagree with the policies of given administration to take advantage of that healthy distrust by manipulating it toward their own ends.

Read the whole thing.
The left/media are going to play this off as the White House attacking the free press. That’s just not true. The media has been getting away with exploiting these illegal leaks for far too long. The media engaging in outright combat with the Bush administration in recent years has only served to be the proverbial straw breaking the camel’s back.
It is time we plugged some holes. In a time when we are fighting a war against a threat as insidious as extreme Islamic terrorism we can’t afford to have these leaks. It is time we stopped them, and if that means we have to hold some journalists to the letter of the law then so be it.
There is no excuse for these illegal leaks.