By Russ Smith

Who exactly is calling the shots at The New York Times is a fascinating question. It’s certainly not publisher Arthur Sulzberger, who’s living in his own bunker or “bubble,” wondering when his clan will give him the boot—but give the paper credit for rising from the mat and attempting to sucker-punch its increasing number of critics.

At least Chuck Munich Schumer is impressed. New York’s senior senator (in name only) claimed that the Times’ “stunning” front-pager last Friday revealing that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency after the attacks of 9/11 to eavesdrop on the phone calls of suspected terrorists, including Americans, had led him to vote against the extension of the Patriot Act. There’s little doubt that the story had no effect on Schumer’s disgraceful vote, but you have to love the moxie of the Times printing James Risen and Eric Lichtblau’s bid for a Pulitzer on the same day that the U.S. Senate was debating the renewal of the Patriot Act.

Never mind that the Times, supposedly a champion of “full disclosure” in both journalism and government, didn’t note that the article was a sneak preview of Risen’s forthcoming State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, scheduled for release by Simon & Schuster in January. No harm in skirting ethics when the country’s fate, as dreamed up by the Times, is at stake.

Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, who must be having a devil of a time trying to ferret out “excellence” these days, tried to put the best face on the daily’s latest act of subterfuge when contacted by Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi. In the Post story of Dec. 17, Rosenstiel stretched the imagination by saying, “It’s not unheard of to wait for a news peg. It’s not unusual to discover the existence of something and not know the context of it until later.” Nice try, Tom, but it’s hard to believe that no “news peg” could be found in the year since the story was ready for publication.

Then there’s the matter of how momentous the revelations were. The Bush administration tapped the phones of people they considered threats to the safety of this country’s citizens? That’s a plus in my book, and instantly makes you wonder why Bill Clinton didn’t employ the NSA in the same manner, starting right after the botched ’93 attack of the World Trade Center. Unfortunately, Clinton, like the media elite, was more concerned in “playing by the rules” of legal mumbo-jumbo that’s outdated in an era of once-unimaginable opportunities for information-gathering—whether it’s by newspapers, corporations, mercenaries or Islamic jihadists—by sophisticated technological means that are beyond the ken of most of us.

The Times ran a corker of an editorial on Dec. 18, bragging about the Risen-Lichtblau story (“This Call May Be Monitored…”) that would be truly stomach-churning if it wasn’t of a piece with the paper’s single-minded determination to discredit the Republicans in general and Bush in particular. The writer spoke on behalf of all Americans, claiming “They trusted their elected leaders to follow long-established democratic and legal principles to make any changes in the light of day. But President Bush had other ideas. He secretly and recklessly expanded the government’s powers in dangerous and unnecessary ways that eroded civil liberties and may have also violated the law… President Bush defended the program yesterday, saying it was saving lives, hotly insisting that he was working within the Constitution and the law, and denouncing the Times for disclosing the program’s existence. We don’t know if he’s right on the first count; this White House has cried wolf so many times on the urgency of national security threats that it has lost all credibility. But we have learned the hard way that Mr. Bush’s team cannot be trusted to find the boundaries of the law, much less respect them.”

I agree with the editorial on one count: There was no need for Bush to “denounce” the Times, since that’s giving the paper more significance than it deserves. But as for “crying wolf,” perhaps it’s eluded the cloistered Times editors that the United States hasn’t, incredibly, been attacked since that September day four years ago.

Is there really any doubt that if Franklin Roosevelt, who rounded up Japanese-Americans and chucked them in internment camps, would have used the surveillance methods of today had they been available to his administration? Or that Woodrow Wilson, who really did curtail civil liberties by jailing members of the media who spoke out against his actions in World War I, would have acted similarly?

(In fairness, not the entire staff of the Times is producing sloganeering journalism. For example, reporter Kurt Eichenwald had a fine piece on Dec. 19 about child pornography on the web, focusing on a California teenager named Justin Berry who “sold images of his body on the Internet over the course of five years.” Still, Eichenwald—or, more likely his editors—couldn’t resist mentioning the results its six-month investigation has yielded. Years ago, when the Times’ credibility wasn’t as questionable, I doubt the following sentence would be included in the story: “The Times inquiry has already resulted in a large-scale criminal investigation.”)

Luckily, Times readers will be spared op-ed columnist Frank Rich’s take on the NSA actions until at least next Sunday; his Dec. 18 column, presumably filed before Risen’s story appeared, was about the immense cultural significance of Brokeback Mountain. Bob Herbert, on the other hand, seems content to go down with the Times luxury liner. No stranger to hyperbole, Herbert proclaimed on Dec. 19 that the CIA’s “secret prisons” abroad are “the dungeons of the 21st century.” But it’s this single line of Herbert’s that, at least this week, perfectly sums up his paper’s editorial view: “The Bush version of American values, at least with regard to the so-called war on terror, has been a throwback to the Middle Ages.”

—December 19