One of the media’s favorite phrases that they use to justify all their actions is “people’s right to know.” They apply that supposedly inalienable right to everything. Nevertheless, the people’s right to know is not in the Constitution.
Yes, there is that phrase “freedom of the press,” but that just means that newspapers can print anything they want. It does not mean that reporters can uncover national secrets and probe into anything they want to be able to print an inside scoop. When that happens, usually something is left out that, had it been left in, would have made the story sound less ominous. Reporters and the general public don’t know everything, and therefore cannot understand the entirety of a situation. However the person in charge usually knows about it, and understands it.
Secrecy is a foreign concept to the much of the press. They don’t realize that some things the public just does not need to know. Every detail of how we fight our enemies is not supposed to be in the headlines on every newspaper. Why? Maybe because [[gasp]] some enemies might read our national newspapers, and change their tactics so as not to be caught!
After the Abu Graib incident, the media demanded that all documents be released, all persons involved put under investigation, etc. All this was put under the banner, “people’s right to know.” But now, with more and more documents being declassified that we took early on in the war, it is slowly being revealed that there were WMDs in Iraq. The wickedness of Saddam’s regime is being further discovered. But the question is: Where are all the media demands for further declassification of the documents? They don’t want the documents to be published, because then it will show that they were lying all the time when they hammered into our heads that there were no WMDs in Iraq. It doesn’t fit their agenda, so they won’t look into it. So much for people’s right to know. I guess that principle is case sensitive.
Hypocrisy is rampant. That’s human nature.
UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has just posted that the New York Times has just commited another example of the “people’s right to know” syndrome.
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