Thanks to a tipster with a sharp eye, we sought out a small story tucked away on page A18 of this morning’s New York Times — and we’re glad we did, because said story strikes us as passing strange.
The piece in question informs us that FBI agents have phoned two reporters in the Times Washington bureau, David Cloud and Steven Weisman, seeking information about a Pentagon official already convicted of passing classified information along to two pro-Israel lobbyists.
An unnamed official tells Times reporter David Johnston that the agents were trying to determine whether the lobbyists passed the same information along to reporters, in an attempt to influence their reporting on the Middle East.
It’s only when the reader wonders how, exactly, did reporters Cloud and Weisman (or, for that matter, the Times itself) respond to the G-men that the story goes black. Because reporter Johnston neither raises that rather pregnant question, nor attempts to answer it.
So what have we here?
A newspaper that spent much of 2005 trumpeting its determination to never bend to government subpoenas demanding testimony from reporters is now not even telling its readers whether it resisted a couple of informal inquiries from federal agents?
That’s just a little too cloak-and-daggerish for us.
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.