Msm Doesnt Get Freedom Of The Press - Road to the Middle Class

IT IS INTERESTING to follow Hugh Hewitt’s interview (perm) of Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial board member Elizabeth Sullivan. Sullivan had published an article supporting the New York Times’s outing of the Bush Administration’s program to track down terrorist financing. So Hewitt got to do another of his forensic interviews, the kind in which he manages to show that the MSM journalist in question doesn’t have much “there” there.

HH: [The New York Times] named three specific, they named three specific cases where SWIFT had led to the arrest of terrorists. Those three, then, can be reversed engineered by the associates of those individuals. That's...those are three specific cases. But more broadly, what this FBI, Lormel man is saying is that when you tell and broadcast, you alert the less smart, the less sophisticated...

ES: The...it is, I think, not persuasive in this case. Not persuasive to me that that's the case.

Elizabeth Sullivan basically argues that the media should be the judge of whether to publicize a classified program, and that they should not be accountable for making a mistake.

I just don’t think that the American people are going to like that. The whole point of freedom is that it is not a license to do anything you want without accountability, but that it gives you freedom from prior restraint. But if you make a mistake, if you harm someone, then you should pay the piper.

The reason that we have a legal system is precisely to judge contested actions. Did the government judge correctly that the use of SWIFT for tracking down terrorists was appropriately secret? Is the New York Times correct in saying that its revelation of the classified program does not materially harm the nation’s ability to track down terrorists? Let’s try the facts and the law and find out.

And the MSM is arguing that because they are special, because they are important, they should not be accountable for their actions.

They just don’t get it.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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