President Donald Trump (R) is looking to seal off leaks, especially those that center on potentially treasonous leaks to the press.
A leaked report claimed that the U.S. strike only set back Iran’s program by a few months. U.S. officials have said the nuclear sites were destroyed and it would take years for Iran to rebuild them.
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Trump suggested compelling the journalists who publicly reported on the leaked intelligence to reveal their source for national security reasons.
Certainly such leakers should be identified, haled into criminal court, and if convicted, locked up for a very long time. This kind of leaker isn’t just violating his oath of office, or the terms of his employment, he’s committing the felonious act of sending classified material—national security-related material—to the press, which our enemies avidly read. Furthermore, the only way this sort of leaker can have passed the classified material along to the press is by having stolen the material first, and the theft itself should be separately punished with a jail term.
There’s more to this than just that, though.
In all other walks of life, receiving stolen goods is itself a crime, magnified by efforts to profit from the receipt. Unlike the legal and medical professions, there is no intrinsic right to confidentiality between news writers—journalists—and their sources. The Frankenstein-esque creation of a “need to protect sources” is right next door to violating the 14th Amendment’s requirement for equal treatment under law.
Journalism would suffer mighty and irreversible damage were journalists required to reveal the source(s) who transmitted to them stolen materials or communicated to them information the sources were revealing in violation of the obligations of their position? This is cynically offered nonsense. In times past, journalists were required by their editors to have at least two on-the-record sources corroborating the anonymously sourced information those journalists published. That requirement has since been abandoned by the journalist guild.
What concrete, publicly accessible, and publicly measurable standard of journalistic integrity do today’s news writers and their editors use? They refuse to say, which is them saying loudly and clearly that they have no standard.
It’s long past time to bring journalism, which refuses to regulate itself, back within the bounds of a law that the rest of us must obey.