Seeker Blog

Jack Kelly highlights a new Ralph Peters column:

IF a street-corner thug knowingly receives stolen goods for profit, he goes to jail. If a well-educated, privileged journalist profits from receiving classified information - stolen from our government - he or she gets a prize.

Is something wrong here?

Ralph Peters thinks so. His column in the New York Post today is a delight to read:

Media outlets, including the generally responsible Washington Post, have had fits over a few retired generals’ unclassified criticism of the Secretary of Defense, while simultaneously insisting on their own right to receive and publish our nation’s wartime secrets - and to shield the identities of unethical bureaucrats who betray our nation’s trust.

Since the Vietnam era, reporters have convinced themselves that they are the real heroes in any story. The archways above our journalism faculties soon may sport the maxim: “The Press can do no wrong.”

But the press can do wrong. And it does it with gusto. Let me tell you what the illegal receipt and exploitation of our nation’s secrets used to be called: Espionage. Spying. Yet today’s “real” spies cause less harm to our national security than self-righteous journalists do.

[…]

So I would ask three questions of those journalists chasing prizes by printing our wartime secrets:

* Can you honestly claim to have done our nation any good?

* Did you weigh the harm your act might cause, including the loss of American lives?

* Is the honorable patriotism of Edward R. Murrow truly dead in American journalism?

If you draw a government (or contractor) paycheck and willfully compromise classified material, you should go to jail. If you are a journalist in receipt of classified information and you publish it to the benefit of our enemies, you should go to jail (you may, however, still accept your journalism prize, as long as the trophy has no sharp edges). And consider yourself fortunate: The penalty for treason used to be death.

When a journalist is given classified information, his or her first call shouldn’t be to an editor. It should be to the FBI.