It’s Fall 2003. Democrats and many media commentators are in an uproar over the publication, by conservative columnist Robert Novak, of the name Valerie Plame. “There must be an investigation,” they demand. “And that investigation must be independent, free from the influence of Attorney General John Ashcroft or anyone else too closely allied with the Bush White House. This is very, very serious stuff.”
Well, they got what they wanted. The CIA-leak investigation began in September 2003, and in December of that year it came under the leadership of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who continues in that job today. Two months from now, we should all take a moment to commemorate the probe’s third birthday. Perhaps there will be a fourth, and a fifth, and, well, who knows?
Given that the Justice Department has gone to such extraordinary lengths to investigate a leak that has never been shown to have seriously damaged U.S. national security — in the case of perjury charges against Lewis Libby, Fitzgerald has said he does not plan to offer “any proof of actual damages” done by the Plame leak — it should certainly also be investigating a leak that clearly has done significant harm to our government’s efforts to keep us safe.
We’re referring, of course, to the New York Times’s exposure of the details of the Treasury Department’s program to monitor terrorist finances, one of a recent series of damaging leaks that also revealed the secret prisons in Europe and the NSA surveillance program.
Read the whole thing.
The problem, as I see it, is that even if the Justice Department launches investigations into all of the recent media leaks about the Bush administration's efforts to combat terrorism those investigations may not gain traction with the American public.
Despite the rise of so-called "alternative media" such as blogs and talk radio, the mainstream media (tv/newspaper reporters) still sets the tone of national debate. After all, without incessant media coverage what controversy is ever really a controversy? Would Plame have been the massive, nearly three-years-long soap opera that it is without reporters across the nation (across the globe even) breathlessly reporting, analyzing and all-in-all beating every single emerging detail to death?
Of course not. If certain key media outlets had ignored, or made light, of the story it would be nothing but a footnote regardless of how important (or how trifling) you may think the controversy is.
This applies to the leak of the Treasury Department program, as well as the existence of secret CIA prisons in Europe and the NSA phone call database/domestic intelligence gathering issues. The media isn't likely to focus on the risk to national security aspect of those stories because they're the people responsible for publishing the leaked information. These leaks are good for reporters, allowing them to print sensational stories that draw a lot of eyeballs to their publications/television programs. Thus the reporters aren't about to begin running stories or following leads that cast those leaks in much of a critical light.
Oh they'll go through the motions, but these instances of leaks won't be the subject of the same sort of journalistic swarming the Plame thing enjoyed. Because journalists are self-serving, and reporting on the very real national security threats these leaks pose just isn't in their self interest.