To tell the truth . . .

Matthew Dowd, who served as chief strategist in the re-election campaign of George W. Bush in 2004 and who now is an ABC News political analyst, raises some important questions concerning the uproar of the WikiLeaks release of U.S. diplomatic documents:

He quotes his Iraq war veteran son as having asked, in a post-Thanksgiving dinner conversation:

“When as a country did we become a place where the government gets upset when its secrets are revealed but has no problem knowing all our secrets and invading our privacy?”

Citing Republican outrage over Hillary Clinton's "secret" meetings on health care planning back in the early 1990's -- and the Democratic outrage over Cheney's "secret" meetings on energy policy in 2000 -- Dowd observes:

Now both sides have gotten together to attack WikiLeaks over the opposite situation: They are criticizing the Internet watchdog for openly releasing information related to how our government conducts foreign policy. . . .

Some would contend that secrecy in domestic policy is a very different matter from secrecy concerning our relations with other nations and their leaders, especially in a time of war. I would agree, up to a certain point. But "secrecy" and "classified documents" offer up an all too convenient cover for mistakes and mendacity, whether it's simple embarrassment or criminal acts, including lies to get us into an illegal war and the war crime of torturing prisoners of war.

Where is the "free press" in this? Dowd asks. The New York Times has defended its right to publish selected portions of the leaked documents (edited to remove some sensitive information). But publishing documents that were supplied to you by another party is viewed differently from the criminal offense of the one who secretly copied the memos and gave them to WikiLeaks. The suspected copier seems clearly to have committed a crime -- he was authorized to work with the documents but his revealing them to others is a serious criminal offense.

But what of the middleman, WikiLeaks, who received the documents and passed them on to the media and tried to make them available online? Is that a crime? This is what the media seems to be avoiding commenting on. When is the whistleblower a hero and when a villain?

Dowd, again:

When did we decide that we trust the government more than its citizens? And that revealing the truth about the government is wrong? And why is the media complicit in this? Did we not learn anything from the run-up to the Iraq war when no one asked hard questions about the justifications for the war and when we accepted statements from government officials without proper pushback?

My own sense is that we should err on the side of telling the truth, even when it’s inconvenient or when it makes our lives—or the business of government—more complicated. And that people who tell the truth should at the very least not be denigrated. . . .

And shouldn’t news organizations be defending WikiLeaks and doing some soul-searching of their own about why they aren’t devoting more resources to the search for the truth? Why is it that the National Enquirer and Internet blogs sometimes seem better than they are at finding out what’s really going on?

The decline of journalistism's "watchdog" function has long been a growing concern of mine. Where are the Edward R. Murrows and the Walter Kronkites? Perhaps it is the Jon Stewarts and the Rachel Maddows -- and the new technology and internet bloggers who will take up that role. WikiLeaks played an important role in this. But there are powerful forces out there, including our own government, trying to crush them. They have already gotten Amazon.com to deny them access to its web spaces.

Where is the outrage?

Ralph