MICHAEL WALSH: How the New York Times Abuses the ‘Public’s Right to Know.’

But why was the FBI acting like the Bidens’ private Praetorian Guard in the first place? No one alleges that Ashley Biden’s diary was stolen, and even if it was, so what? A lost diary, even one belonging to yet another troubled Biden offspring, is not a federal case. And in any event, Project Veritas never published the contents of the diary. The FBI investigation was concerned with “how a diary stolen from President Biden’s daughter, Ashley, came to be publicly disclosed a week and a half before the 2020 presidential election.”

As it turns out, the diary was simply left behind in Florida by a “rehabbing” Ashley, where it was found by a third party and offered around to various outlets.

So, on the one hand, the Times is trying to use its (transient?) victory in the Pentagon Papers case to justify publishing legally protected correspondence concerning, among other things, O’Keefe’s lawsuit against the Times as well as the legal boundaries of his “undercover” methods of collecting information. At the same time, it was acting as an agent of the Democrat-controlled U.S. government in collecting and publishing dirt on a rival and political opponent to smear and destroy him.

A final irony is that Times holds freedom of the press to an absolute, Mosaic standard while at the same time attacking freedom of assembly and freedom of religion, not to mention the entire Second Amendment, and supporting imaginary “hate speech” laws that clearly abrogate freedom of the press itself.

In other words, the “public’s right to know”—which by the way is nowhere to be found in the constitution—for me, but not for thee. The old Times motto was “all the news that’s fit to print.” Now it’s, “l’etat c’est moi.”

Read the whole thing.