[WikiEN-l] The terrorists have won

[Ken Arromdee]

On Mon, 6 Jul 2009, stevertigo wrote:
> > More generally, my point is that the reasoning offered for the
> > censorship is intellectually bankrupt.
> 
> Well let's not attribute to malice what better can be ascribed to
> corporate do-gooderness. Obviously, if the NYT, in presenting
> themselves to media, represented their case as being a tactic rather
> than simply a gesture of compliance, then they now have a little issue
> of journalistic integrity with everyone they dealt with.

That gets back to something I notied a while earlier:

Letting the newspaper decide that the harm done by suppressing information is
less than the benefit of helping the prisoner survive, when the prisoner is
a newspaper reporter, *is a conflict of interest*.  We can't rely on the New
York Times to make an unbiased, fairly presented, argument for weighing the
two options when they're trying to protect one of their own reporters.

It's not just the Times' fault for not having the journalistic integrity
to describe the situation accurately, it's ours for trusting them.  We
*shouldn't* trust someone with a conflict of interest.  The fact that we
did so shows that we don't have a good enough grasp on what it means to
have a conflict of interest.