Reporter's Dilemma: To Take a Leak, or Not

Today's medianote comes from a National Public Radio story about the growing debate over whether journalists should be prosecuted for reporting classified information that has been leaked to them by sources inside the government. On the one side is the public's right to know and the First Amendment right to a free press. On the other side is the government's responsibility to protect the public during wartime.

I have a concern and an observation about this. First the observation: If a journalist published leaked classified information in the Los Angeles Times, and that action becomes a crime, why arrest only the reporter? Shouldn't the editors and other gatekeepers who allowed the story into print be held responsible too? The federal lockup could get pretty crowded.

Now the concern: I'm well aware that the American news media was censored during the First and Second World Wars. And I agree that it was OK to have restraints against reporters providing advance information about the D-Day invasion, or something like that. But our current situation is different. The world wars ended, and did so by mutual agreement. Civilian enterprises including the news media were encouraged to go back to a peacetime footing. But today the situation is not so clear-cut. How will we know if or when the war on terror is won? It's hard to imagine every one of the loosely-aligned terrorist groups opposing us getting together to sign a peace treaty. In the absence of that, under what circumstances would our federal government declare the war on terror over and accept a resumption of the news media's typical peacetime role as a watchdog over government? This is a role, I might add, that sometimes includes the reporting of leaked information.

It could be a long wait.