SWIFT and the Birth of a Meme

Nothing in the Blog Handbook says memes have to be true. A recent one is that the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal all should have refrained from publishing stories about the SWIFT banking-data program. Our latest practitioner is Howard Kurtz, who reprints the following in Media Notes online this morning:

"Let me depart from the liberal consensus and argue that the New York Times, while acting in good faith, made the wrong call by printing the SWIFT story," says Slate Editor Jake Weisberg . "Editors there and at the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal who also had pieces of the scoop should have waited to publish it, at least until they could be more certain that the snooping program was no longer useful. . . .

Hang on there. Every timeline I've read shows the Wall Street Journal deciding to publish only after learning the other two papers were going ahead. And while the LA Times probably would have published on their own, even they decided to print after the New York Times did. Why is most of the anger directed at the New York Times? That's why. Patterico has a good post about this, with a cameo from our friend Mr. Kurtz:

UPDATE 6-28-06 5:44 p.m.: Howard Kurtz today casts a slight shadow of doubt on one of my conclusions, with an unsourced allegation that the Journal, like the NYT and LAT been working on the story for some time:

The Wall Street Journal had been working on the banking story for a long period of time but did not reach the point of having enough information to publish until Thursday afternoon, according to a staffer who declined to be identified because the newspaper is making no public comment. The Journal does not know why Treasury officials made no appeal against publication in that paper, but editors assume that by then the officials were resigned to the fact that the details were coming out, the staffer said.

As Patterico says, researching a story isn't the same as publishing it, never mind breaking it. In any case absent new information Slate's Jacob Weisberg is definitely wrong to fault the Journal for publishing secrets that had already been compromised.

And while I hope Kurtz doesn't make the same mistake in the future, I'm pessimistic given his misrepresentation yesterday claiming that intelligence about Saddam seeking Niger's uranium was "unsupported." That mistake, as of today, is "uncorrected."

Comments

[Steve Austin]

Q: Why didn't the mostly Democrat press ask more skeptical questions about the lead-up to the Iraq war?

A: Could it be that every professional one of them had been reading the most convincing arguments ever made for an Anti-Saddam invasion, which were the quotes from EVERY major Democrat leader from Senators to Congressmen to members of Mr. Clinton's administration? Just reviewing the statements of Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, and John Kerry on the subject will make you so glad we got rid of Saddam.

See, with Americans, nothing changes just because a new President comes into office. "The Cut 'n Run Chorus" spoke much more clearly and passionately in making the case for our immediate action in Iraq.

Oh - sorry guys & gals: that history isn't going away, either.