Legal Research

Silence is Golden

Back in 1962, President Kennedy asked members of the press to sit on the story about the discovery of Russian missiles in Cuba. This gave Kennedy about a week to try and defuse the crisis privately with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, without the pressures of intense media scrutiny and public opinion. Though Kennedy ultimately had to go public with the story, we’re all still here, so the 7-day media blackout had to have helped.

I’m a big believer in the freedom of the press, but sometimes too much information can be a bad thing.

Here’s another example. The NY Times reported yesterday that for seven months it suppressed information about the capture of one of its reporters, David Rohde, by the Taliban. The Times felt that if his situation was made public, Mr. Rohde would become a high-profile case, and his safety would be jeopardized. They asked the Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales to delete information about Mr. Rohde’s capture from his page. Apparently, that took a lot of effort, as several contributors repeatedly attempted to add the information to Mr. Rohde’s page. They didn’t appreciate the censorship. One said, “We can [continue to] do this [for] months.”

Mr. Wales and his staff recognized that most of the edits appeared to come from one user in Florida. “We had no idea who it was … There was no way to reach out quietly and say ‘Dude, stop and think about this.’”

Finally, when the Times itself broke the story of Mr. Rohde’s escape, the citizen-editor finally got to edit the page and vent his spleen with the following comment: “Is that enough proof for you [expletives]? I was right. You were WRONG.”

Which reminds me of this comic from xkcd. Someone calls from offstage, “Are you coming to bed?” A guy at the keyboard says, “I can’t. This is important. Someone is wrong on the Internet.”

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on June 29, 2009 (boomark / email).