United States

Happy Independence Day. In between grilling, lawn mowing and fireworks watching, take a few minutes to secure your right to know what your government is doing, a cornerstone of our freedom. The best way I can think of doing so in today's America is to go out and buy a copy of the New York Times. Or subscribe. But one way or another, pay for it, regularly. Right now, more than any other...

The story that most aroused N&O readers in the past week has to do with the press and national security. When is it appropriate for newspapers to publish information that could jeopardize our common safety and well-being? The question arises from the disclosure in The New York Times and other national papers, and reported subsequently in The News & Observer, that the government is monitoring an...

THE Bush administration's unusually harsh attacks on The New York Times for exposing a secret banking-data surveillance program have turned a glaring spotlight on the paper's decision to publish the article. President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Republican legislators have singled out The Times in recent days for disclosing the counterterrorism program, even though The Los Angeles Times and...

MANY READERS have been sharply critical of our decision to publish an article Friday on the U.S. Treasury Department's program to secretly monitor worldwide money transfers in an effort to track terrorist financing. They have sent me sincere and powerful expressions of their disappointment in our newspaper, and they deserve an equally thoughtful and honest response. The decision to publish this...

Every passing week, it becomes more apparent that disgruntled leftists in the intelligence community and antiwar crusaders in the mainstream media, annealed in their disdain for the Bush administration, are undermining our ability to win the War on Terror. Their latest body blow to the war effort is the exposure, principally by the New York Times, of the Treasury Department’s top-secret program to...

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee urged the Bush administration yesterday to seek criminal charges against newspapers that reported on a secret financial-monitoring program used to trace terrorists. Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) cited the New York Times in particular for publishing a report last week saying that the Treasury Department is working with the CIA to examine an...

The following is a letter Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, has sent to readers who have written to him about The Times's publication of information about the government's examination of international banking records: I don't always have time to answer my mail as fully as etiquette demands, but our story about the government's surveillance of international banking records has...

I had the rare occasion, for me, of talking with a group of congressmen last week in Washington, and as our session broke up, I changed the subject abruptly. I asked, "Could you stop the present administration from locking up reporters?" They chuckled. The request was baldly self-serving, since I often write stories that concern national security. Perhaps they also regarded my concern as far...

NEW YORK, June 22 (Reuters) - They call it the World Wide Web, but newspapers trying to grow online audiences are focusing on deeper local coverage to build revenue. The Internet gives them tools to attract new customers, which leads to a rise in advertising, said executives at the Mid-Year Media Review conference in New York this week. To do so, newspapers have had to do more than publish the...

One of several journalists sent packing by U.S. military authorities at Guantanamo Naval Base last week has come out with her story of what happened when she and others were forced to leave. Carol J. Williams of The Los Angeles Times wrote in Sunday morning’s edition of the newspaper. The reporter complained of what she called “a Pentagon power play that muzzles already reluctant sources and an...