from Gawker.com
The current Men's Vogue has an article on everybody's favorite newsman, Brian Williams (and by "everybody" we mean Gawker and Keith Olbermann and SNL and 30 Rock and, at least most of the time, America). We're on record as being fans of the sunkissed anchor ourselves, and the piece by Ned Martel for the most part confirms that. But it led off with something that raised both our brows, as follows:
"I know, I know," Brian Williams says into his low-end Motorola. "What if that ever got out?"He's talking at a rapid clip to his NBC colleague Tim Russert, the host of Meet the Press, about the exclusive Roosevelt Room meeting they just had with President George W. Bush. This was the plan: Williams and Russert and their network peers (Gibson, Couric, Schieffer, Stephanopoulos, and others) would get the president's perspective on the troop surge he was scheduled to announce in a few hours, and no quotes would be allowed to emerge without approval. But some doozies, like the one Williams and Russert are kibitzing about, slipped out of the president's mouth. When this happened, Williams recalls, he looked around at the ashen faces of White House aides, who quickly imposed a retroactive lockdown on that tidbit, whatever it was.
And so Williams keeps the secret, despite my needling across a two-foot-long folding table that separates me from the anchor of the NBC Nightly News--he of starchy wardrobe, stiff hair, and Dudley Do-Right air--on a northbound Amtrak about an hour later. He can talk about it with Russert and anyone else who was in the room, but no one on the outside, not even his wife, Jane, herself a savvy onetime TV news producer. "I call them 'go-to-the-graves,'"Williams says, tallying about a half-dozen he maintains for Bush alone. Williams hastens to add that today's just-between-us moment was not meant to shield the president from a trifling embarrassment, but instead to preserve the United States' options for multifront warfare. (emphasis added)
Ummm...hello? We're all for keeping things off the record (if you are, federal goverment), but this strikes us as rather scary and cabal-like. Basically, this means that ALL of the top newsies — Russert, Williams, Schieffer, Couric — could collectively be in on some big stuff. Preserving the United States' options for multifront warfare? MULTIFRONT WARFARE? I mean, yikes. At what point does this stop being about reporter's privilege and start being about information and transparency and truth? That's not a question ETP feels equipped to answer; obviously there are many factors that would come into play (like, for example, operational military information such as troop movements, which is kept mum for security purposes). But if the President was talking about, say, a war with Iran (it just happens to be a front that comes to mind), it starts to seem more murky, particularly in light of what we now know about the backstage goings-on to the last war. Should members of the press at its highest levels collude to keep quiet about matters of grave national importance? (Barring an immediate security risk, of course, though as the New York Times will attest, the administration's gotta make a convincing case for that.) Executive privilege and national security notwithstanding, should this really be an absolute "to the grave" privilege — particularly when it might be sending others to theirs? These are tough, important questions and ETP doesn't presume to know the answers. We just sorta think they should be asked, and hope that Williams, Russert et al are not shrinking from the asking.
