behind the news

Digging Past the Conventional Story Line

October 6, 2005

Journalists, being the self-obsessed group that they are, sometimes stretch a story that has little to do with the media into a narrative in which reporters themselves become part of the tale.

Other times, they report stories that have obvious import for themselves and their business, either without grasping that fact or without letting their readers know it.

This is one of those times. Case in point is yesterday’s guilty plea by former Defense Department analyst Lawrence A. Franklin, who stands accused of passing government secrets to two employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel lobbying group.

Franklin, who worked for the Defense Department as a specialist on Iran, was indicted in August 2004, along with AIPAC lobbyists Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, for conspiring “to communicate national defense information … [to] persons not entitled to receive it.” The story made some headlines last year when it first came to light, and has popped up every now and again since, but Franklin’s plea yesterday has, as the New York Times noted this morning, brought renewed attention to the issue. (Not so much attention, however, as to inspire prominent play — the Times put the story on page A22.)

The Washington Post gives the story more weight (and probably does a better job, if you ask Jay Rosen), publishing its article on page A2 — but we’re not here to quibble about story placement today.

Instead, what we find most intriguing about the case is what Eli Lake writes in this week’s New Republic about the effect the case may have on the ability of journalists to do their job and still stay out of jail.

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As Lake notes, “[A] prosecution of this kind is unprecedented. Far from alleging the two AIPAC officials were foreign agents, U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty is contending that the lobbyists are legally no different than the government officials they lobbied, holding Rosen and Weissman to the same rules for protecting secrets as Franklin or any other bureaucrat with a security clearance.”

What does this all mean? As Lake writes,

But, if it’s illegal for Rosen and Weissman to seek and receive “classified information,” then many investigative journalists are also criminals — not to mention former government officials who write for scholarly journals or the scores of men and women who petition the federal government on defense and foreign policy. …

[T]he federal government has traditionally respected an implicit First Amendment right of publishers and private citizens to determine the public’s right to know about national security. Without journalists’ ability to disclose secret information, the executive branch would be the sole arbiter of what information the public could have about its government’s foreign policy. And, when the public is kept in the dark, it’s hard to combat excesses.

This is an obviously complicated story, and one which we will leave to investigative journalists to hash out, but Lake brings a fresh angle to it we haven’t seen before. As Steve Aftergood, “an intelligence expert at the Federation of American Scientists” told him, “very few people outside of government will ever get their hands on classified documents. But everyone who reads the newspaper is in possession of classified information.”

A salient point, that.

And one that certainly deserves some thought, even if the big boys of investigative journalism seem to have missed it.

What it means for journalism and the ability of reporters to receive and handle information gleaned from inside sources is still unclear. But if the three accused men are found guilty, and eventually a journalist is prosecuted for simply writing a story dealing with national security issues, none of us can say we weren’t warned.

–Paul McLeary

Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.