The Corner

Dereliction of Duty

One of the worst things, among many bad ones, about the Libyan catastrophe has been the administration’s selective and minimal release of information and a corrupt media’s complicity. When it is a question of leaking sensitive information to the prominent house Washington Post or New York reporters about the most intimate details of the bin Laden raid, or the anguish the president goes through in selecting his Predator-drone hit targets, or the unheralded administration success of the Cyberwar against Iran, suddenly we can find the most intimate, classified details about our military efforts — to the point of endangering our security (prompting former defense secretary Robert Gates purportedly to tell National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon to “shut the f*** up”). But when an ambassador and three others have been killed, a consulate stormed, and our very top officials on record as misleading the American people about the cause and nature of such an attack, there is a general media blackout. The unfortunate message is that a compliant media will endanger national security to enhance the reputation of this administration; but not post facto worry about finding how it was lost and why Americans were killed — if it might question the administration’s judgment. Of all the things written about the four Obama years, one of the most telling will be how an entire industry forfeited its integrity for political purposes and lost its reputation.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won; and a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.
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