Bradley Manning Gets No Love From The New York Times

The Times has covered Mannings trial to some degree--in early November, the paper published a story about Mannings plans to plead guilty to some charges and the Times editorialized against Mannings poor treatment at Quantico back in March of 2011. But last weeks hearing, with Mannings direct testimony, seemed especially newsworthy--outlets including CNN, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and New York Magazine covered it. The Guardian, another newspaper that collaborated with Wikileaks and the Times, sent veteran reporter Ed Pilkington, the chief reporter for Guardian U.S. and a former national and international editor for the paper. Pilkington called his decision to cover the hearings in depth pure news judgement, when we spoke.

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The Times has always had a rocky relationship with WikiLeaks, Manning, and other leakers of state secrets. After publishing the cables, Bill Keller, the Times executive editor at the time, wrote an 8,000-word New York Times Magazine story in which he compared Julian Assange to a bag lady. We regardedAssange throughout as a source, not as a partner or collaborator, he wrote. The Guardian, on the other hand, sought partnership between a mainstream newspaper andWikiLeaks: a new model of cooperation aimed at publishing the world's biggest leak, as Yochai Benkler described it in the Harvard Civil-Rights Civil-Liberties Law Review. (My emails to Times executive editor Jill Abramson, Washington bureau chief David Leonhardt, and Keller, were not answered.)

The Times attitude towards Assange and Manning is, at least, consistent with its treatment of leakers in the past. Even though the Times had to defend itself in court for publishing the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellberg told me over the phone that the papers lawyers refused to offer him even the smalles amount of help with his criminal case (which was eventually dismissed). In Ellsbergs telling, A.M. Rosenthal, then the editor-in-chief of the Times, told him there was no policy at the paper regarding prosecutions of sources: Ellsberg was, after all, the first person ever prosecuted for leaking classified government documents to the press.

Editors and reporters have a good deal of ambivalence towards their sources, especially in the national security field, Ellsberg told me. They all thought I had broken the law, and a lot of them may have thought I was a traitor even though they used the material. When Assange expressed his shock to Ellsberg over a critical profile the Times published about him, Ellsberg told him dont take it personally, they didnt treat me any better.

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Bradley Manning Gets No Love From The New York Times