It's Not Journalists' Job To Protect Government Secrets
With the controversy over the leaked White House group chat, mainstream media have been treating secrecy as a virtue and disclosure as a vice. That’s a dangerous game.
You don't have to be more Catholic than the Pope, as the saying goes. But over the past week, an accidental leak to The Atlantic has transformed journalists into bigger defenders of government secrecy than the government itself. It has created the bizarre situation of journalists asking the White House to keep them away from juicy, fresh, newsworthy information.
To recap: National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally added Atlantic Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a White House group chat for planning an upcoming military campaign in Yemen. After Goldberg reported on the existence of the group chat on Monday—without revealing much about its contents—the embarrassed Trump administration downplayed how sensitive it was.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe all insisted that there was nothing "classified" in the text messages. On Wednesday morning, The Atlantic published the full transcript, with commentary complaining that this information would "typically" be classified and could have harmed U.S. troops had it "fallen into the wrong hands" before the campaign began.
Although The Atlantic meant to make the White House eat its words, the decision to publish on Wednesday also made several journalists eat theirs. Earlier in the week, mainstream media had praised Goldberg's "patriotic" decision not to report on the substance of the war plans.
"If somebody else had been added to this group chat, there were real national security concerns here," CNN Chief Media Analyst Brian Stelter said on TV. "Goldberg was patriotic. He didn't tell anybody. He didn't go out and share the war plans, of course. He just listened in and tried to figure out if this was real or not, and apparently it was all too real."
Meanwhile Stelter's colleague, CNN Chief National Security Analyst Jim Sciutto, spent his time arguing with Leavitt that the information should have been classified. Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig similarly praised Goldberg "for treating the info more carefully than apparently the 'principles' overseeing U.S. security," referring to the White House Principals Committee.
Respect for government secrecy is apparently a virtue—which would make intrepid reporting a vice. Could the Pentagon Papers have been reported today? How about the secret National Security Agency mass surveillance programs leaked by Edward Snowden? Many mainstream journalists made it clear this week that they would avoid exposing such scandals, or only do so in order to push the government to be more careful with its secrets.
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein quipped in his newsletter that those reporters are acting as "self-appointed counterintelligence officers" and shirking their "duty to their client, the public." They're also acting against their own self-interest. Pushing for more restrictions on information and less forgiveness for leaks is a dangerous game for journalists to play, especially given the Trump administration's use of the Espionage Act against WikiLeaks and Gabbard's more recent threats to prosecute leakers.
After all, some of the most important stories in American journalism—including the Pentagon Papers and the Snowden leaks—came from sources defying classification laws. There has historically been an "uneasy stalemate" between freedom of the press and the national security state in America, writes historian Sam Lebovic in State of Silence. While the government runs a tight ship internally and punishes employees for violating secrecy, information that breaks containment and reaches journalists has generally been fair game to talk about.
The 2016 election was a turning point in the media's view of its own role. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was dogged by scandals around her mishandling of classified emails, while Republican candidate Donald Trump benefited from leaks of Clinton campaign documents, some of which were allegedly released by Russian military hackers. The feeling that journalists had "failed" the "test" of 2016, and had to be more conscious of the national security implications of leaks, grew.
Through successive incidents—the discovery of Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop, the leak of J.D. Vance's campaign vetting documents, Trump's alleged bathroom hoarding of classified files, and the Discord document dump—mainstream media seemed to be becoming more defensive of government secrecy. (Klippenstein himself was banned from X and visited by the FBI for publishing the Vance dossier, which mainstream outlets refused to touch, because it was allegedly leaked by Iranian hackers.)
The Discord incident became an opportunity for American media to debate its newfound approach to leakers. When classified documents began appearing on Discord video game chats, investigative journalists quickly identified the leaker as Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, and reporters from The New York Times arrived at his house just before the FBI did.
Glenn Greenwald, one of the reporters who broke the original Snowden leaks, claimed that mainstream media "love leaks when the CIA and Homeland Security tell them to leak" but "will actually hunt down the leaker and demand that he be punished even more" when a leak undermines the government's story.
Barton Gellman, a reporter who had covered Snowden for The Washington Post, told Politico that journalists owed Teixeira "no special protection, and his identity and motives are important elements of the story." After all, Teixeira was "not a journalistic source and didn't make this bargain with anyone," Gellman pointed out; his leaks just mysteriously appeared online as the media scrambled to make sense of them.
Still, journalists often hold back on publishing information that can harm people, even if it's technically fair game for reporting. Goldberg, for example, has repeatedly declined to report on the identity of a CIA officer in the White House group chat. If it's unethical to expose a spy to the risk of prison or worse, then why wouldn't the same considerations apply to condemning a National Guardsman with poor impulse control to the same kind of consequences?
On the flip side, the benefits of reporting on secret military operations sometimes outweigh the risks. In addition to revealing general problems with U.S. military policy in Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers unmasked specific military operations that the U.S. government had tried to keep secret, including air raids on Cambodia against Congress' wishes. The Nixon administration used the same appeals to troops' safety that The Atlantic did in arguing for courts to censor the Pentagon Papers.
The Atlantic's decision to publish the full group chat transcript, however reluctantly, may prove to be a gift for public accountability. Yemeni authorities have accused the U.S. of killing women and children, while the U.S. military insists that it saw "no indications of any civilian casualties." But Waltz admitted in the group chat that the U.S. military killed a Yemeni commander by collapsing "his girlfriend's building" with no warning. Conflicting reports of civilian casualties from airstrikes are nothing new, but journalists and researchers investigating such incidents in other wars have rarely had such a window into officials' internal decision-making process.
As Stelter argued, the White House group chat could have turned out quite differently in a different journalist's hands. Goldberg, an enthusiastic supporter of the undeclared war in Yemen and Middle Eastern wars in general, was far less willing to undermine the government's line than someone like Klippenstein or Greenwald would be. But to his credit, he at least published something. Many other journalists have revealed this week that they see responsible journalism as shutting up and trusting the authorities.
