Journalists must not be made accomplices by the secret service to solve its own problems.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Journalists couldn't do their jobs overseas without taking risks, and the same is true for diplomats and intelligence officers.
The fact is that in a way, journalists become a kind of default in the system when you don't have substantive two-party back-and-forth inside of the government.
We have to protect all journalists, and journalists have to be allowed to do their jobs.
As opposed to journalists, politicians cannot make do with questions. They must also offer answers.
It is beyond dispute that President Obama and his aides have an extreme, even unprecedented obsession with concealing embarrassing information, controlling the flow of information, and punishing anyone who stands in the way. But, at least theoretically speaking, it is the job of journalists to impede that effort, not to serve and enable it.
Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write.
It shouldn't take extreme courage and a willingness to go to prison for decades or even life to blow the whistle on bad government acts done in secret. But it does. And that is an immense problem for democracy, one that all journalists should be united in fighting.
I am not one of the great journalists of my time.
Freedom of the press is not questioned when investigative journalism unearths scandals, But that does not mean that every classified state document should be made available to journalists.
Lawyers, judges, doctors, shrinks, accountants, investigators and, not least, journalists could not do the most basic tasks without a veil of secrecy. Why shouldn't the same be true of those professionals who happen to be government officials?