We hear a great deal of moaning in the legacy media about how the rise of Internet media – news aggregators and blogs, to name just a few – has become the death knell for their industry. Eyeballs have been peeled from newspapers and placed elsewhere, taking with them the lucrative advertising fees newspapers used to charge subscribers.
And there’s something to be said for that. After all, it costs money to have bureaus overseas to help a domestic audience understand the impact of strange things in far places, not to mention beat reporters afflicting the powerful while empowering the afflicted here at home. Google wouldn’t have RSS feeds without paid reporters to gather the information, and blogs would be much the poorer place if each pajama-clad enthusiast had to think of things to pontificate upon all by his lonesome.
Still, there has been a sense for some time now that the grand names of the newspaper business are less tribunes of the people than business interests in their own right, less interested in reporting the news than making it, more engaged in indoctrination than education. And above all, completely without scruple when it comes to the national interest, tying that interest more to political party than to commonsense.
Perhaps it’s a legacy from the Blitz, when all British citizen knew that they were in it together regardless of social station. Perhaps it came from knowing that grave consequences often hang in the balance, and that the public’s right to immediately know the truth might need to be tempered by their enduring need for security.
Whatever the reason, things are still handled a little differently, overseas:
British counter-terrorism units arrested 11 men in raids across northwest England on Wednesday in an operation that was accelerated when potential details were inadvertently disclosed in news photographs of a top counter-terrorism official.
A person familiar with the investigation said the men arrested were Pakistani-born, naturalized British citizens. This person said the men were viewed as a very serious threat and had violent intentions, though other details were not immediately available.
According to a person familiar with the operation, the men were arrested late in the afternoon at locations including an Internet café and a residential home in central Manchester, one of England’s largest cities; Clitheroe, a town in Lancashire County; and a library at John Moores University in Liverpool.
The raid was hurriedly put in motion on Wednesday after Scotland Yard’s most senior counter-terrorism official, Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick, appeared at No. 10 Downing Street to brief Prime Minister Gordon Brown on the impending action…
The fact that news agencies had photos of the planned actions prompted the British government to implement a media blackout by issuing a so-called D-Notice. The notice, also known as the DA-Notice, or Defence Advisory Notice, is issued by the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee. The notice dates to 1912 when military officials sought to protect the publication of information useful to an enemy.
It was a “blackout” in name only, since media co-operation is entirely voluntary. Nor are the British media lambs when it comes to skewering government, and the royals for that matter as well. Still, they do not dream to think themselves as “citizens of the world,” and had the essential decency to withhold their breaking news until the conspiracy could be swept up.
Try and find that, here at home.
Dangerous when they lay our country’s secrets on the table? – absolutely. But that’s kind of like being shot at in combat – you come to expect/accept it. What is far more dangerous is the insidious kind of “journalism.” Like a slow cockpit depressurization or O2 failure, our MSM has become the slow killer of our country’s greatness…
O/T, but Lex might just like this photo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vector1771/3354792647/sizes/l/
The NYT has comitted treason several times. They did it during the Vietnam war, as did “Uncle” Walter Cronkite. Revealing things like Lex cites above, falls under the head of “aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States” and can be prosecuted under that head. The fact it won’t be tells a story no one should want to hear, but speaks volumes to where the US stands as a country.
QM/
The “mood of the country” was EXACTLY why Daniel Ellsberg (ex-Marine 1/lt, btw) wasn’t formally charged and tried for leaking the Pentagon papers and why Nixon had to resort to having the “Plumbers” ransack his shrink’s office in an attempt to get something with which to discredit him in the court of public opinion–as it was obvious “the public” (sad to say, as in the instance you cite) was not going to tolerate formal treason charges. (and in this reading of the public temperament Nixon revealed himself to be an astute political weatherman–and it looks like the wx-pattern hasn’t changed all that much, either.)
Since you posted, Lex, it’s been revealed that the arrests didn’t follow the brief because the attack was imminent, but because the bumbling briefer was photographed holding SECRET documents that revealed many details of what the government knew. The blackout was not to protect the operation per se (Fleet Street has no morals, alas), but to quash publication of the leaked classified documents. The leak forced the government’s hand and necessitated the arrests. HMG had no more confidence in the national loyalty of the press than we have in ours.