UPDATE: It took overnight, but they did post my comment to that blog. The Public Editor gets a hat tip for having more nerve than I gave her credit for.
Is even the Public Editor of the New York Times, Margaret Sullivan, afraid to publish a comment (or not allowed to) that claims Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. "knuckled under" to pressure from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney? Or is she not even in charge of monitoring the comments offered for her blog?
Yesterday I was reading the blog of the New York Times Public Editor...
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/...
... and this caught my eye:
Mr. Baquet took issue with Mr. Hickey's statement when I read it to him, calling it "an unfair criticism," and pointing to a number of stories in recent years — including many disclosures from WikiLeaks — that have shown the paper's willingness to push back against the government. He also noted that it was The Times, in 2005, that broke the original story, by James Risen and Mr. Lichtblau, of a government spying on its citizens in the Pulitzer-winning story about warrantless wiretapping. It took courage to print that, he noted, even considering the much-criticized long delay while The Times considered the government's request not to publish.
I had something to add about that "...much-criticized long delay while The Times considered the government's request not to publish." I typed up a comment, but I didn't think to save the text before I submitted it. I wish I had. Often you can tell more about a newspaper by what it censors than by what it prints. Their policy is that "Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive." My comment was highly critical, but I don't think it was abusive and it was certainly on topic.
I felt that even the reference to that "...much-criticized long delay..." let the Times off too easy. I wrote that as I remember, the Risen-Lichtblau story about warrantless wiretapping under the George W Bush administration was ready a month or two before the 2004 presidential election. Bush and Cheney summoned the chief editor of the Times and Mr. Sulzberger to the White House to twist their arms not to publish it. The Times buckled under (I know I used that term), sat on the story, and only published it when it was about to come out in a book one of the reporters was writing. I went on to point out that had the story been published before the election, it was possible Bush and Cheney wouldn't have had a second term. Also, voters would have had a chance to repudiate them precisely because of warrantless wiretapping. (I wanted to go on to say that might have convinced future presidents, starting with John Kerry who would have been elected, that warrantless wiretapping was one of those third rails of American politics, but I'd used my 1500 characters and was out of space.) So I hit "submit" and went to lunch.
Is even the Public Editor of the New York Times, Margaret Sullivan, afraid to publish a comment (or not allowed to) that claims Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. "knuckled under" to pressure from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney? As Ms. Sullivan notes, that story won a Pulitzer Prize, but that was in 2006. If it had been published in a timely manner, it would have won the prize a year or two earlier. And George W. Bush might not have had a chance to fill two seats on the Supreme Court, and Edward Snowden might not have been so alarmed by what he found at the NSA that he felt compelled to go public with it.