Bad Press

„Here the press—at least, the more established American corner of it—has a standard that works as a daily guide to behavior, even when it seems to defy logic. A congeries of information-gathering techniques, including breaking and entering, stealing, and phone-hacking, are unpardonable and can never be undertaken directly by news organizations, but if others give news organizations the fruits of such labors it’s fine to publish them. Bradley Manning is a traitor, but Nick Davies, of the Guardian (who received Manning’s »war logs« from WikiLeaks), is a patriot, and Julian Assange occupies some nebulous in-between zone. Prosecutors who use search warrants to pry into politicians’ personal lives and then leak their findings before filing any charges are sleazy. Journalists who publish transcripts of Eliot Spitzer’s text messages to a prostitution service are models of professionalism. Ritual sanctification is assumed to take place at the moment when questionably obtained information passes into the hands of a reporter.

This is a little facile. The phone-hacking affair ought to inspire more than glee over seeing Rupert Murdoch and his entourage of lieutenants and relatives get in trouble; the questions it raises aren’t limited to tabloid journalists. The case ought to reawaken everyone’s awareness that personal privacy shouldn’t be defenseless against the intrusions of powerful institutions. Journalists are indispensably well positioned to expose abuses of power, but a press pass is not a moral unlimited-ride card. If the scandal caused journalists to reflect upon their own power, and their capacity to abuse that power, it would be a good thing.”