NYT's Risen: Things Have Never Been as "Difficult and Poisonous" for Journalists as They Are Today

"The environment has never been as difficult and poisonous as it is today" for journalists reporting on the government, according to The New York Times' James Risen.

At the Times' headquarters last night, Risen spoke on a panel entitled, "The Pentagon Papers and What They Mean Today." Risen -- who, along with Eric Lichtblau, wrote the paper's groundbreaking story on the NSA's domestic surveillance program -- was joined by Allan Siegal, a 45-year veteran of the paper who was on the editing team that produced the Pentagon Papers coverage and who stepped down last month as the standards editor, and Floyd Abrams, the highly respected First Amendment attorney who served as co-counsel for the Times in the litigation that followed the publishing of the papers. The discussion was moderated by Jill Abramson, the paper's managing editor since 2003.

The bulk of the 90-minute panel was devoted to issues surrounding the history and aftermath of the Pentagon Papers coverage, but Abramson noted at the outset the obvious relevance of the discussion to what's going on today, with a government obsessed with secrecy, an unpopular war, and a story from the Times about the current administration's conduct that has led the White House to consider its legal options.

Abramson kicked things off by asking Siegal what it was like to be on the team that published the stories, and whether they knew the stories would be as consequential as they were. The audience was populated mostly with people who probably remember the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, but for the few who weren't around then, Siegal provided a detailed and engrossing account of how the stories went to print and what the editors were thinking at the time. Siegal said they would turn out to be wrong in their thinking in two key respects. First, he said, "We believed that some of us would go to jail." According to Siegal, when then-publisher Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger -- not to be confused with "Pinch" Sulzberger -- saw the Pentagon Papers, he said "it looked like 20 years to life." As to their second mistake, "We were wrong that [publishing the papers] would end the Vietnam War overnight."

Risen then spoke at some length about the difficulties of reporting on classified matters and protecting anonymous sources in the post-9/11 world. After noting how hard it has become for journalists working under the current administration, Risen pointed to further parallels between the Pentagon Papers reporting and his own work, shedding some light along the way on the sources for his NSA stories. "I think the motivations were probably very similar," Risen said, between the leakers who divulged the workings of the NSA program and those who gave the Times the Pentagon Papers. Rather than partisans with an agenda, as the White House has often tried to portray them, the people who approached Risen were "deeply concerned" about the legality of the domestic surveillance program. "Some of the people who talked to us had a tortured look," he added, and they were "not enthusiastic to leak."

Abrams talked about the landmark Supreme Court decision that grew out of the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, in which the Court, in an extremely brief opinion, held 6-3 that it would not enjoin the publishing of the documents and thereby work an unconstitutional "prior restraint" of expression. (Each Justice wrote an additional opinion of his own, but there was no majority consensus on a rationale for the Court's result.) "Had there been no Pentagon Papers case," Siegal added later, "we might not have done the NSA story." Abrams and Risen later noted, however, that the New York Times decision may not provide as much comfort for journalists working today as they might hope. Courts are inclined to formulate conceptual boxes for lines of judicial doctrine and precedent, Abrams said, and there is a tendency to put the cases involving the prosecution of leaks in a different conceptual box than prior restraints decisions. Risen picked up on this point, as well, saying that "the leak investigation is the method of choice today" for chilling reporting, "partly because of the Pentagon Papers." "Up until the Bush administration, there was virtually no threat that a reporter would be subpoenaed," Risen said.

During the question-and-answer period, an audience member questioned whether the precedent set by the Pentagon Papers, in practice, was really as weighty as people had suggested, at least insofar as it supposedly prevented the government from prohibiting publication of certain stories. The questioner pointed to the controversial gap between when the Times first reportedly had the NSA story, somewhere around October 2004 -- just before the presidential election, when, some have argued, publication might have led to a President Kerry -- and when it eventually went to print, in December 2005. According to Lichtblau and Risen's first story on the program, the Times delayed running the story because of concerns raised by senior administration officials that "it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny." Wasn't the government, the audience member asked, effectively able to dictate the Times' publishing schedule? "I wouldn't put it that way," Risen responded. "It was extremely complicated and difficult for everyone involved," he said, noting that the government fought hard not to have the story come out. Abramson clarified that the story "was not completely frozen" for the approximate year that it was held. She said, in particular, that over that time period the reporting on the legal issues surrounding the program was greatly strengthened. In fact, Abramson said, the questions about the legality of the program became "a big factor" in deciding to move forward with publication.

The panel was drawing to a close when one of the last questioners posited an interesting hypothetical -- If the Pentagon Papers hadn't revealed systematic deceptions on the part of the government, would the paper have published them? Does the government have a general right to internal documents that simply and candidly probe past mistakes? -- the answer to which likely gave many Times readers in the audience confidence that the paper would not easily bow to governmental pressure or intimidation. Siegal stressed that reporters should never break the law themselves in order to get a story but that the paper would report on important stories that it legally obtained. Addressing the question more directly, Siegal said, "We respect the right of the government to keep its secrets," adding, after a mischievous beat, "if it can."