Journalism after Snowden

The Columbia Journalism Review reports on this panel just held at their school of journalism, and I thought it was interesting:

Later in the evening, Barton Gellman, who leads NSA coverage at The Washington Post, spoke to this same issue. Speaking from the audience, Gellman asked the panelists to try to parse the Director of National Intelligence’s statement this week that Edward Snowden “and his accomplices” should return the documents he stole in order to protect US security from being further compromised. Are we to understand that James Clapper was referring to the press with that term, “accomplices,” Gellman asked, or was this just a rhetorical flourish of his agency’s frustration? Either way, he said, it is getting harder to report on national security issues.

“Almost everything you want to write about, if you are writing about diplomacy or intelligence or defense, is classified; everything but the press release and the news conference is classified,” Gellman said. “That’s just the way the US government works. There may be more classified information now than there is open-source information on the planet.”

In a larger sense, though, what information is or is not classified, and what legal protections reporters may or may not have, are beside the point—as these NSA stories have revealed. Schulz responded to Gellman’s concerns with this frightening truth: “The technology that we have today, you don’t need to subpoena a reporter anymore. There’s an ability to find out who gave out any information,” said Schulz. “And we should all be very concerned about that, because we all need whistleblowers…. If we don’t have a mechanism that allows for whistleblowers, our whole society is going to suffer.”

That was a persistent and important theme that the panel kept returning to—that, besides journalists’ legal protections, equivalent protections should be extended to the people who risk their livelihoods, and lives, to bring this information to light in the first place. Gibson said Snowden had “an eerie prescience,” and described his sense of urgency in getting as many NSA stories published before the government, and his critics, tried to make the story about him and his traitorous intentions.

Bell agreed: “Where oversight has failed, a whistleblower and journalism has succeeded,” she said. “And yet the system is still wanting to punish, if you like, the one thing which has led to transparency and clarity.”

“But that should be completely unsurprising,” Abramson jumped in, citing the fact that the current administration has investigated seven “criminal leaks,” more than twice the number of such investigations, based on a law passed in 1917, pursued before President Obama took office. That such legal battles were still being fought by James Rosen, of Fox News, and James Risen, of the Times, were mentioned several times throughout the evening.

Gibson also highlighted the new and alarming ways in which the Snowden story has caused certain threats from the establishment to escalate.

“Instead of the position that journalists find themselves in where they’re being threatened with prosecution over identifying their sources, we are now being put in the position of something even more chilling—of being ‘co-conspirators,’” said Gibson. The accusation is now “‘You’re part of a conspiracy, possibly involving the KGB, or maybe China. Because the ordinary way of chilling journalism won’t work in this case. And I think this should be profoundly worrying, because that’s not going to stop. That is a ‘Journalism After Snowden’ problem.”

H/t Seth Okin.