The question being: What is to be done?
The New York Times, a publication I have relied on for years for accurate and often excellent investigative reporting, has done us wrong. It has "circled the wagons," as one writer put it, in defense of White House correspondent Maggie Haberman's indefensible concealment of Donald Trump's mishandling of, and possible destruction of, top-secret national security documents while president. There can be no justification of either Haberman's or the Times' misconduct. Both are journalistically deplorable and ethically offensive.
For her part, Haberman sat on news of White House staff having discovered that official papers were once blocking the president's bathroom — "the assumption by staff was that Mr Trump was tearing [them] up and flushing them away," reports The Independent. Yet Haberman hid from the public this immensely troubling story. She kept it private to enhance the sales of her book, Confidence Man, due out 4 October.
Thus a NYT White House correspondent withheld vital information about a sitting president's gross mishandling and probable vandalism of sensitive national security documents, entirely for personal profit. More shocking: Go to the New York Times and enter "haberman" in its search window. Right. Nada. The nation's "paper of record" has chosen to stay off the record about one of its own — an enormously unethical journalist.
Observes D. Earl Stephens, former managing editor of Stars and Stripes: "I worked at five newspapers in my career. At every one of them our first and only responsibility was to our readers, NOT reporters who were sitting on stories and writing books to serve themselves. I am past sick and tired of Maggie Haberman, the NYT and all these damn books."
In an accompanying tweet, Stephens wrote: "As hard as we should be on the Habermans of the world, it’s her bosses at The New York Times who should get 99 percent of the blame for allowing and even encouraging this breathtaking bullshit. They are taking our money, to sit on the news."
Wrote author Amy Siskin: "Reporters at the NYT and beyond circling the wagons to protect Maggie Haberman, and openly ridiculing accusations of what clearly appears to be unethical behaviour, is why journalistic practices don’t improve and trust in journalism is largely in the basement."
Other tweeters have joined in the recriminations of Maggie Haberman, writing that she "is the poster girl for what’s wrong with modern journalism; profit over profession," and "Yea congrats to her sitting on a story about the sitting president destroying classified documents just so she can get paid." Quite handsomely, one should add.
It's one thing for a greedy journalist to heave financial self-interest over professional obligation. But in the board rooms of the NY Times, whole groups of men and women sworn to uphold the public interest have conspired to aid and abet a journalistic felon on the run.
I won't, I can't cancel my subscription to the Times. Other journalists in its cubes are worthy of the trade and daily provide information essential to any fair-minded news consumer. The New York Times, however, is, at its highest levels, showing itself to be no more conscientious than a Trump lawyer. So I suppose I'll just have to live with the pain of the bosses' infidelity.
(P.S.: While coincidentally browsing former Stars and Stripes editor Stephens' Twitter thread I ran across a pretty nifty description of the abovementioned scofflaw: "[A] thrice married, serial philandering, casino bankrupting, Bible shaking, North Korean despot love letter exchanging, coup plotting, insurrection inciting, intel stealing puppet for Putin.")