United States

Republican lawmakers who think attacking the New York Times could help carry them to victory in 2006 might want to consider how that tactic played for the party's presidential nominee a decade ago. In the final stretch of the 1996 campaign, the former Senate majority leader, Bob Dole, unleashed an unexpectedly bitter series of assaults on the newspaper. "We're not going to let the media steal this...

The recent disclosure of a secret databank operation by the federal government that tracks terrorist financing has prompted calls to punish reporters and newspapers involved in the disclosure of a confidential anti-terrorist program. The ire comes principally from supporters of President Bush's administration, who believe the press has no business exposing sensitive information when terrorism...

On June 1, 1972, White House Counsel Charles Colson wrote a memo to President Richard Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, saying, "I hate the (New York) Times as much as anyone else and would like to be in the first wave of Army shock troops going in during the second term to tear down the printing presses." Colson and Haldeman hated the Times because the newspaper had more credibility than...

Reaction was fast and furious to last Sunday's column in which I praised The New York Times for publishing information about the Bush administration's secret monitoring of a vast database of international financial transactions. In the column, I was critical of the president and his supporters for "declaring war" on The Times and the media in general, and I stated that this was one war that Bush...

When The New York Times published a story about a secret government program to find terrorists by monitoring financial transactions, conservatives responded as if the paper had given Osama bin Laden the keys to a missile silo. The story, asserted President Bush, "does great harm to the United States of America." Vice President Dick Cheney said the Times and other newspapers "have made the job of...

When President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and several members of Congress recently fired broadsides at The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and, to a degree, The Wall Street Journal for publishing detailed accounts of a somewhat secret counterterrorism program, it was the mightiest political salvo at the press since Maryland's Spiro T. Agnew threatened the big three television networks...

Sometimes lies should be called what they are. "Since publishing a highly controversial story about a secret U.S. program that monitors financial transactions as a tool to fight terrorism, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller... has admitted that the liberal press is not 'neutral' in this war on terror. "Indeed, the track record proves the New York Times and Bill Keller are not 'neutral'...

Mike, if you're still reading the paper, the United States hasn't found the weapons of mass destruction that were the reason the country went to war in Iraq. I would have called and told you the news personally, but you were so angry at The Bee, you hung up before giving me your last name and phone number. The last thing you said was that you were canceling your subscription. Mike was one of...

Let me come forward and speak up for The New York Times. No, I'm not saying I necessarily would have published its story on a program to track terror financing, a story that has put the paper again at the center of a furious storm. But I know from experience that it's almost impossible to put yourself into an editor's shoes, to know all the factors that went into such a decision. Sometimes...

For those who enjoy a summer blockbuster, the dust-up between the Bush Administration and The New York Times has been a real clash of the Titans, a bare-knuckle brawl between the press and the White House. We haven't seen the likes of this since Spiro Agnew labeled the press "nattering nabobs of negativism" back in the Nixon Administration. It's a controversy that defies easy answers or a safe...