Journalist leaks are in the public interest and do not necessarily pose a major threat to national security, former executive editor of The New York Times Jill Abramson argued at a lecture Thursday.
Abramson, who started her career as an investigative reporter for Time Magazine, spent 17 years in senior management at The New York Times, becoming the first female managing editor in 2003 and later the first executive editor. She was fired from her position as executive editor in 2014.
Abramson said former University President and President of the United States Woodrow Wilson, Class of 1879, “is very relevant to my topic tonight” in reference to the Espionage Act, which he signed into law in 1917 and limited freedom of speech during World War I.
Laws similar to the Espionage Act have been revived in the post-9/11 world to prosecute leakers and journalists who publish stories based on classified intelligence, Abramson said.
One leak noted by Abramson was the Times’ courageous decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, a collection of classified documents that chronicled the history of the Vietnam War and were commissioned by the Pentagon in 1971. The report included false history, false justifications for the war and false reports of progress.
Although there was no effort to prosecute the Times, President Richard Nixon obtained an injunction against the paper, she explained. This eventually led to the Supreme Court’s landmark decision, New York Times Co. v. United States, concerning prior restraint.
Abramson also described how the Times held a story involving the National Security Agencyfor a year in 2004. The story disclosed a classified wiretapping anddata-mining program, and publication was halted after President George W. Bush told then-Times executive editor Bill Keller and publisher Arthur Sulzberger that the paper “would have literal blood on its hands if it published the story.”
Abramson explained that Edward Snowden later decided to approach The Guardian rather than the Times with his story because he was angry with the paper for holding off its previous NSA story.
The Snowden leaks were very important for the public to know about, Abramson said, adding that she was anxious and sad that the Times was not the newspaper publishing Snowden’s leaks.
Abramson also said that she would receive phone calls from Director of National IntelligenceJames Clapper, asking her not to publish stories.
On one specific occasion, the Times published a story but withheld several detailsupon Clapper’s request, only to find a day later that a competitor of the Times published the same story which included all the details.
“I ended up feeling burned,” she said, “I decided to withhold information that would have made our story stronger and compelling, and it appeared elsewhere.”
Abramson added that, following the incident, she met with Clapper to inform him that if she were to consider a request in the future, she wanted it to come directly from the Office of the President.
“Here I was in his office giving him a constitutional lesson, quoting Madison and Jefferson, and reminding him that the founders of our country … felt that journalists were a protection over excesses of centralized government,” she said.
Abramson said that in the eight cases of prosecutions concerning leaks in the past two administrations, the individuals were all whistleblowers who worked for the government and felt it was their duty to inform the public of illegal government power.
She concluded with the statement that the public is certainly better off knowing about the government’s secret and large-scale eavesdropping.
“Has the publication of these stories actually harmed national security?” she said. “I don’t think theObama administration or the British government have really presented any compelling evidence that shows these stories have harmed national security or pose a threat.”
The lecture, titled “In Defense of Leaks: Why a Free Press Matters More in the Age of Terror,” took place at 5 p.m. in Dodds Auditorium. It was hosted by the University Press Club and co-sponsored by the Wilson School, the Council of the Humanities and the Women’s Center.
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