You’d think one of our most main stream outlets would play it down the middle, wouldn’t you?  Letting us decide?  Not so in case of ABC, which has decided for us that the NSA operative who spilled classified beans to NY Times did not violate his so-called sacred trust but gave us news wholly fit to print:

“Russell Tice, a longtime insider at the National Security Agency, is now a whistleblower the agency would like to keep quiet,” says Brian Ross of ABC, hoping we all will think, if ABC says it, it must be so. 

However. “Did it ever occur to ABC News that maybe the NSA wants to keep Tice quiet because they take seriously the sensitive nature of what they do every day to protect the nation against terrorist attacks?” asks John McIntyre at The RCP Blog.

If it did, the thought was dismissed immediately, we presume.

“My question is,” continues the RCP man, “why is a guy who divulges highly classified information to people who aren’t cleared to have that information necessarily a whistleblower? How does ABC News know that Mr. Tice is a whistleblower and not a criminal?”

Hey, they have their sources.

“Among the five major dailies in the Chicago of my early boyhood, my father preferred the Daily News, an afternoon paper reputed to have excellent foreign correspondents,” says Joseph Epstein in Commentary. “Democratic in its general political affiliation, though not aggressively so, the Daily News was considered the intelligent Chicagoan’s paper.”

Something has happened, however.  Epstein cites all the familiar grim details about newspapers’ decline in our day:

Four-fifths of Americans once read newspapers; today, apparently fewer than half do. Among adults, in the decade
1990-2000, daily readership fell from 52.6 percent to 37.5 percent. Among the young, things are much worse: in one study, only 19 percent of those between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four reported consulting a daily paper, and only 9 percent trusted the information purveyed there; a mere 8 percent found newspapers helpful, while 4 percent
thought them entertaining.

He adds loss of advertising, draconic staff cutbacks, reduction in size of pages, UK parallels to all this.  His father read his Daily News religiously, but

Today, his son reads no Chicago newspaper whatsoever. A serial killer could be living in my apartment building, and I would be unaware of it until informed by my neighbors. As for the power of the press to shape and even change my mind, I am in the condition of George Santayana, who wrote to his sister in 1915 that he was too old to “be influenced
by newspaper argument. When I read them I form perhaps a new opinion of the newspaper but seldom a new opinion on the subject discussed.”

He gets the NY Times, reading it (a) to see who died, (b) to learn “if anyone has hit upon a novel way of denigrating President Bush; the answer is invariably no, though they seem never to tire of trying,” and (c) in general to stay abreast of what’s said, as Santayana did in 1915.  This daily exercise takes him a half hour.

For how long FISA takes to approve a wiretap, see Natl Review’s Byron York quoting the 9/11 Commission and other pretty good sources showing how long it takes, not for FISA to decide, but to ask it:

In 2002, when the president made his decision, there was widespread, bipartisan frustration with the slowness and inefficiency of the bureaucracy involved in seeking warrants from the special intelligence court, known as the FISA court. Even later, after the provisions of the Patriot Act had had time to take effect, there were still problems with the FISA court — problems examined by members of the September 11 Commission — and questions about whether the court can deal effectively with the fastest-changing cases in the war on terror.

Consider:

Coleen Rowley, the FBI agent who ran up against a number roadblocks in her effort to secure a FISA warrant in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the al Qaeda operative who had taken flight training in preparation for the hijackings. Investigators wanted to study the contents of Moussaoui’s laptop computer, but the FBI bureaucracy involved in applying for a FISA warrant was stifling, and there were real questions about whether investigators could meet the FISA court’s probable-cause standard for granting a warrant. FBI agents became so frustrated that they considered flying Moussaoui to France, where his computer could be examined. But then the attacks came, and it was too late.

Which is what Bush wants not to happen again.

If you were wondering how the NSA leaks endanger us, read this.  And weep.

Under fire from FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), DePaul U. has revoked its

vague ban on “propaganda” that it used last fall to silence student protest of a campus appearance by controversial University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill,

as mentioned below.  Read about it here and here.

Wisdom reigns among the heirs of Monsieur Vincent?

Meanwhile, FIRE’s “Spotlight: the Campus Freedom Resource” has lots more about DePaul and gives it a speech code rating of Red, which means it has “at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.”

What would St. Vincent say?