I JUST CAUGHT A BIT of New York Times publisher “Pinch” Sulzberger on Charlie Rose, and my reaction was pretty much as negative as Jack Shafer’s.
Sulzberger was going on about how terrible it is that press reports of classified leaks are likely to spawn special prosecutors, without noting the role that the Times played in producing that situation — not least by demanding an investigation in the Plame case — and he made a lot about the public’s right to know without, in the bit I saw, even trying to reconcile that with the fact that the whole Judy Miller dispute was about not telling the public what the NYT knew. It was a deeply unimpressive performance.