Anthony DePalma on Transparency, Media and the Internet

What is your opinion of the New York Times writing articles based on excerpts from the Wiki Leaks trove of classified U.S. military material?

AD: The Times, along with Der Spiegel and The Guardian, handled the material in a responsible and ultimately resourceful way, doing what news organizations are supposed to do ... provide important information. But make no mistake; their publication of the leaked documents marks a real watershed in the development of journalism, one with great promise and also great risk.

Until now, whistleblowers needed to establish a relationship directly with a reporter or editor in an established publication or electronic media. The process was not an easy one for either the journalist, who needed to somehow establish the reliability of the source and the accuracy of the material, and for the whistleblower, who often ran up against weary and skeptical reporters who had heard similar stories about "a great story for you," hundreds of times before.

WikiLeaks, with these revelations about the Afghanistan war, has changed that equation, allowing the whistleblower to bring forward information without being reliant on the mainstream media. It is important to note, however, that mainstream media played an enormously important role in the Afghanistan memos. Had WikiLeaks posted the documents without the three news organizations, the impact would have been severely limited.

The Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel lent a sense of authority to the project that called attention to the documents. The organizations in essence provided a filter through which the information passed. Their experience and expertise added value to the release of the documents. It isn't hard to imagine what might happen in other cases if information or documents are leaked but experienced professional journalists are not involved and there is no filter.

In many other major investigative projects for the media, the whistleblower is anonymous. In what ways are anonymous tips and data desirable? In what ways are they out of line?

AD: Protecting the identity of a news source is an absolute necessity. By providing the documents to the three news organizations in advance of their posting on the internet, WikiLeaks provided an opportunity for reporters at the three organizations to verify the authenticity of the information, to put the material into context and to cull through the documents to remove some of those that might have negative consequences for some of the individuals named in them.

The problem here is that the documents were dumped onto the Internet afterward, and the raw material may still include sensitive information. It didn't take long for the Taliban to claim that it was trolling through the material on the Internet to identify people in Afghanistan who were working with the Americans in order to retaliate against them. In this case, it seems the mainstream media took a more responsible approach by leaving out the information that endangered the individuals.

Considering that the head of WikiLeaks is as secretive as the military and intelligence organizations he is so critical of, and is virtually unavailable and unaccountable, what are your thoughts about the Times working with such a person and giving him and his group imprimatur?

AD: Before agreeing to publish anything on the documents, reporters and/or editors from the three news organizations met with WikiLeaks executives to discuss the project and to finalize plans. The reporters remained in contact with them through the process. So I'm not sure that I agree completely with the premise of your question. As for his accountability, I'm certain that the continued success of his site will depend entirely on how he handles the responsibilities that come with it. If, in fact, people in Afghanistan are targeted because of descriptions from the documents, he will have to bear the consequences.

The Times of London reported that the names of hundreds of Afghanis who had cooperated with the U.S. military, plus which villages they lived in, were contained in the WikiLeaks documents, thus targeting them for extermination by the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The New York Times refused to link directly to Wiki Leaks mainly for this reason. Despite this precaution, do you think newspaper reporters are qualified to determine or guarantee that revealing military secrets would not endanger soldiers and civilians?

AD: See my answer above. As for the qualifications of reporters, I can only speak about the New York Times military affairs reporter, Eric Schmitt, who is as knowledgable and informed as anyone covering the armed forces or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has been doing this work since the first Gulf War and understands viscerally the dangers inherent in the release of information.

The Obama administration is pursuing legal action against New York Times reporter James Risen for revealing U.S. intelligence secrets during the Bush administration, and it also obtained an indictment of a former top National Security Agency official for providing classified information to a Baltimore Sun reporter. Your thoughts?

AD: The conflict between news organizations and the government over national security is an old one, and not easily resolved. Most news organizations operate under the sound principle that an informed public keeps politicians honest. One striking example of how this works goes back nearly 50 years to the fateful Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The New York Times had prepared a sizable page one story on the upcoming invasion, replete with details about the size of the force, the CIA's role in preparing the invaders and even the expected date of the invasion.

The newspaper's Washington bureau chief, James "Scotty" Reston, feared that the story, as written, gave away too much information and that the Times could be accused of aiding the enemy. Reston convinced the publisher, Orville Dryfoos, to intervene and Dryfoos had the article watered down. It still ran on page one, but in a less prominent spot. References to the CIA's role were removed, and the exact date of the invasion was taken out.

Within two weeks, the invasion took place and as history records, it was a perfect disaster. President Kennedy was deeply embarrassed by the failure, and later remarked to the Times' managing editor, Turner Catledge, "Maybe if you had printed more about the operation you would have saved us from a colossal mistake." It seems to me to be important to keep that lesson in mind now, in the wake of the release of the Afghanistan documents, which is certainly forcing the Obama administration to carefully review its policy and to re-evaluate its decisions about pulling out troops on a predetermined timetable.

Two San Francisco sportswriters became famous for writing stories revealing secret grand jury information concerning baseball star Barry Bonds and his use of steroids. Your thoughts?

AD: As an author and journalist, I look at this situation this way: Was the information obtained from the grand jury testimony important? Did its release in news reports inform public debate about an issue of concern to a broad range of people? Can the information be corroborated with additional reporting? If all three questions can be answered affirmatively, then the stories should be published.

Considering that the above questions deal with the press printing military secrets, intelligence secrets and grand jury secrets, is there too much power of the press? Are there any limits on what the press should be able to do? Are there any limits on how transparent the government should be?

AD: A free and independent press may sometimes be guilty of excesses. No doubt, press freedom can make the lives of elected officials very difficult. And although corporations revel in and seek out good publicity, they are willing to go to court to try to block negative press articles.

All in all, history has shown that the benefit of having a truly independent press far outweighs the negative consequences. We must also be realistic about the age we live in. The ubiquity of cellphones, cellphone cameras and social media such as Twitter and YouTube have changed the journalistic landscape. Although even brutal regimes like those in Myanmar, Iran and Cuba have managed to stamp out free and independent press, they are unable to control the countless cellphones carried by their citizens.

Expectations about government transparency are rising all over the world, and officials who try to deny that they exist will find control increasingly elusive. The amount of material that ought to be concealed is extremely limited to security and public safety. Otherwise, unless a solid argument can be made for keeping data or documents secret, everything should be made available to the public.

During your lengthy career with the NYT, you surely were involved with many stories that posed these important questions for you. Can you share with us the one story that means the most to you now and how you dealt with the ethical dilemmas?

AD: I'd like to tell you about an incident that occurred while I was bureau chief for the New York Times in Mexico to suggest to you that the issues were are discussing here today are relevant and important throughout the world.

In 1996, while I was working in Mexico City, a Mexican source came to me with documents that he said showed how the sitting president, Ernesto Zedillo, had been involved in approving questionable payments while he served as secretary of the federal budget department. The source told me he could not bring the documents to any Mexican reporter because the office of the president was so powerful that no one would touch a story suggesting the current president had in any way been involved with corruption. The source ... someone I knew and with whom I had worked on earlier projects ... said that bringing the explosive documents to me at the New York Times was the only way to get this information to the public, and that it was crucial for Mexico's fledgling democracy to show that everyone, including the president, must be held accountable for their actions.

Once I got hold of the documents, I had to first determine their authenticity. Then I needed to independently verify what it was that the documents said. Of course, my source pushed me to interpret them in one way. Even if, as ultimately happened, I came to the same conclusion as my source about what the documents showed, I needed to get there on my own.

Over the course of two months, I was able to independently report on the situation. Once I was ready to publish the article, my editors in New York and I had a discussion about the ramifications of the article if it ran in NYT. Mr. Zedillo had arrived in office with an unsullied reputation, far different from many other Mexican politicians. Publishing the article would cast doubt on the truth of that reputation, and the president's office was likely to react aggressively against me and the newspaper. Yet the public importance of publishing was great. The Mexican political system was just opening up after a long period of many decades of single party rule and unquestioned obedience to the president, regardless of the truth. I felt it was important for Mexico to experience the same sort of accountability as would take place in the United States or any other true democracy.

Before publishing the article, I checked in with the president's office and gave his spokesman ample opportunity to respond to the charges. Of course, the president denied any wrongdoing, and vaguely threatened to take "whatever legal action necessary" in response to the article. On the day it appeared on the front page of the Times, Mexico's most important newscast led that night's report with a summary of the article and a vicious attack against me and the newspaper. The Mexican authorities never followed through on their threat to expel me, and Mexico's Congress, still tied to the president's office, declined to take any action against Zedillo. But Mexico's democracy was bolstered, and it has continued to grow stronger since.

Some journalists contend that too often the government abuses the classification of material and slaps a secrecy tag to cover up wrongdoing or mistakes by government officials or others with power, and investigative reporting by the press corrects that abuse and informs the public. Your thoughts?

AD: If your readers have a chance to read Jon Krakauer's "Where Men Win Glory," about the death of NFL. star Pat Tillman, they will find chilling evidence about the extent the government is willing to rope off information in an attempt to cover up mistakes. I think it is only logical to take the position that government at any level, anywhere in the world, would try to cover up wrongdoing whenever possible. It's simply the nature of things. Open meetings laws and the Freedom of Information Law act as deterrents to this kind of covert action. The stronger such laws are, the harder it becomes for governments to abuse their power.

Is there anything else you wish to say on this topic?

AD: Yes. We live in a curious and precarious information age. At one and the same time, traditional news media ... newspapers, news magazines and TV news broadcasts ... are losing audience and influence, while websites, news aggregators and ordinary people armed with cellphones become increasingly important purveyors of news and other information, including, sadly, rumors, mistakes and misinformation. Electronic data files record myriad aspects of our daily lives, from the books and videos we take out of public libraries, to the groceries we buy at the A&P. The line between transparency and privacy grows ever thinner, and the threats to security grow just as quickly as the threats to privacy. If the referees and arbiters (traditional media) are going to disappear, who or what will stand in and play the same role? The time to devise an answer to this situation is right now.

(Mr. DePalma left the New York Times in 2008 after 22 years as a reporter and foreign correspondent to become writer in residence at Seton Hall University, where he completed work on his latest book, "City of Dust," about the aftermath of the 9/11 disaster. He is also a member of the faculty at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Among his many professional recognitions are a 2007 Emmy finalist for "Toxic Legacy," and the 2009 Maria Moors Cabot Award for international reporting from Columbia.

(For much of his time at the NYT, he focused his attention on Latin America, especially Mexico and Cuba, but also traveled widely and reported from places as diverse as Albania, Montenegro, Guyana and Suriname. DePalma's journalism also dealt with strategic relations within the Western Hemisphere. He was the first correspondent for the Times to serve as bureau chief in both Mexico and Canada, which allowed him to document the first years of continental convergence under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

(For several years he was an international business correspondent covering the Americas for The Times and in 2001 he published "Here: A Biography of the New American Continent." His second book, published in 2006, was "The Man Who Invented Fidel," about U.S.-Cuba relations. The book has been translated into Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese and Italian. In 2004, he became an environmental reporter for the Times and began covering the significant health impacts of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on New York City.)