Quote:
Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist
The press leaked that it was Israel, and that it was related to the laptop bomb threat. Neither of those details were necessary for the story (arguably I'll admit). You can make the argument they didn't divulge too much and I'll listen to that, but to suggest they have no moral obligation when reporting declassified information is not reasonable IMO.
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The press has no moral obligation to anything. That was (sadly) decided by the Supreme Court along time ago. Also, declassified information is publicly available information. Anyone can get access to it, if they ask for it. So all the press is doing is providing a conduit to that information and acting as a filter. There would be more information in a FOIA request than the media provided, so it could also be argued they are not doing a complete service to the public because of the filtering out of those important details. The fact that the media did provide some filtering, and acted to a level of responsibility the executive did not, speaks a lot about the acknowledgement of their obligations. I appreciate that you think the media released more than they should have, a point we disagree on, but the intent was to shine a light on the egregiousness of the action by the executive. It was the executive branch that made the specific content of the information released the story, not the media.
The media's focus was the transgression of the disclosure in the presence of foreign actors. The executive then used the declassification angle as a defense, then stated the information release was not specific, all of which the press proved to be inaccurate. If there was an improper release of information I would be up their asses in a second, but they have been very reserved in their approach to this and other stories where there has been damaging information they could have provided.