The Times They Are A-…Something

So I was going to crack wise about this letter from New York Times editor Bill Keller, in which he responds to readers complaining about his decision to publish information on the government's secret program to examine international records for terrorist-financing activity. But then Paul at Wizbang summed it all up by providing a much shorter version:

Dear Reader:
  1. We have no reason to believe the program was illegal in any way.

  2. We have every reason to believe it was effective at catching terrorists.

  3. We ran the story anyway, screw you.

Bill Keller

Hugh Hewitt has a very detailed fisking of Keller; in Matthew Hoy's response, the words "idiot", "stupid", and "irresponsible" appear.

Also good on this issue is Soxblog:

I'm convinced that we'll look back at the New York Times' latest choice to reveal a classified program for battling terrorism as the left's bridge too far. In a way, this is unfair to the left. Being a religious reader of the liberal blogs (and what a week it's been on that front!), I've found nary a word of support for the Times' chosen course of action this time around. Normally these are people who relish trumpeting the Bush administration's purported trampling of our civil liberties; this time, they've been curiously mum.
And Instapundit is just great, from his opening sentence:
BILL KELLER ISN'T VERY BRIGHT, or else he thinks you aren't.
… on. Go read the whole thing.

On a totally unrelated matter (via Poor&Stupid), Malcolm Gladwell, is pretty put out with a recent NYT article on drug prices:

The Times' lead read: "Prices of the most widely used prescription drugs rose sharply in this year's first quarter." Wrong, wrong, wrong. It should have read: "Prices of the most widely used prescription drugs fell last year."

Correction, anyone?

Don't hold your breath, Malcolm.

And then there's this:

[NYT stock price]

Maybe the problem will fix itself soon enough.


Last Modified 2012-10-23 3:34 PM EST