Lost in the wake of President Bush’s assertion that he has an inherent power to break the law, is the outrageous action of The New York Times that it sat on the NSA domestic spying story for a Year. The results of the Times decision was to facilitate the President’s lawlessness for a year at the expense of thousands of Americans' right to privacy.
Over the past year, the Times’ journalism ethics and allegiance to the First Amendment have been shown to be less than admirable. Moreover, the downward trend in Journalism to a more casual guardian of the public’s right to know does not bode well for a democracy.
I give you a quote from someone with substantial experience in the area of keeping dirty government laundry from the public’s prying eyes---H.R. Haldeman, in a recorded conversation with President Richard Nixon regarding the publication of the Pentagon Papers:
“…the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this because it shows that people do things that the president wants to do even though it’s wrong and the president can be wrong.”
Bill Sanders
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