Jay Ambrose: A newspaper gone overboard?

The Washington Post recently put American security at risk, but let’s point the finger at President Donald Trump instead. The Post did.

It printed a story saying Trump divulged classified, endangering information to Russians, and maybe he did, but any risk to security was hugely magnified by the Post’s divulging much of it to everyone else. It may even have created a risk that otherwise would not exist.

This episode begins with Trump meeting in the Oval Office with two Russian officials, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador to the U. S. Sergey Kislyak. He talked to them about terrorism and measures to use against it and, according to the Post, revealed secret information from an ally. A threat here, says the Post, is the ally could be disclosed, especially since Trump had mentioned a specific city, and it could quit assisting the United States.

We could thus be left without information crucial for our protection, the Post warned, without adding that the ally and our foes might know nothing about all of this minus the leakers and the Post then asking the world to lend an ear. To be sure, other news outlets have understandably gone with the story since the Post’s revelations, but it is the Post that got things started ( at least this time out).

Of course, the Russians also got the lowdown from Trump, and one might think that could work disastrously for U. S. interests. Maybe so, but then there is the account from National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, who was also at the meeting. In a press conference, he said the discussion was largely about information already widely publicized. The mention of one city did nothing to disclose an informational source that even Trump did not know about, he also said.

Here is a widely informed, deeply respected expert on national security matters essentially saying all this was no big deal, except maybe when we get to the leakers. McMaster mentioned them as a real problem, and when you ask what could have motivated them to do something possibly perilous, the answer seems clear: to get Trump. No doubt they genuinely believe he is unfit for office and could someday land the country in terrible trouble, but that does not make it OK to betray the public interest and dishonor their sworn duties.

Might they even have been committing crimes? President Barack Obama’s administration, you might recall, prosecuted nine accused leakers during his two terms in office. As has been pointed out by a reporter who tangled with the Obama team, that compares to three leakers prosecuted by all the administrations that came before him. The Obama team also went after press colluders, spying on some and threatening others with jail if they did not report their sources.

Even some loyalists in the Obama administration got confused and themselves leaked to jeopardizing effect, a Fox News account recalls. They publicly identified a CIA operative in Afghanistan, endangering his life, and on another occasion revealed much that should never have been told about doing serious digital damage to Iran’s nuclear ambitions that have since been resuscitated.

It’s a peculiar age in which we live, one in which disclosures that scorch the common good are somehow justified if they also fry someone in power. I am for press freedom and aggressive reporting, but there are instances in which the American public’s right to stay whole exceeds our enemies’ right to know. I also agree that Trump is an intellectually disheveled mess, a complete, total stumble- tongue, impulsive, narcissistic and the list grows long. Keeping an eye on him is important, but there can be a point when reporting is more nearly destructive animosity.

The Washington Post has been a great newspaper, especially on things Washingtonian, but its overreaching and that of many other news outlets lately has been deeply troubling.

A government $20 trillion in debt has just extended — not eliminated, as promised — funding for a public broadcaster that regularly infuriates and offends half the country.

The recently enacted Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2017 not only gave the Corporation for Public Broadcasting its regular $495 million sweetsop, Congress also threw in another $50 million to upgrade its “interconnection system.”

Yet again, it was a two-year “advance appropriation” for the CPB — a special arrangement designed “to provide a firewall of independence” from the government accountability that usually goes hand in hand with government funding.

Back in March, President Donald Trump had proposed zeroing out funding for the CPB. The headlines promptly blared that public broadcasting was “in a fight for its life.” CPB CEO Patricia Harrison proclaimed that the loss of federal funds would lead to “the collapse of the public media system.”

Having won a reprieve, could one expect CPB, which funds NPR and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), to use this time to become less biased? Hardly.

With Congress demonstrably incapable of cutting the umbilical cord of funding, why should the CPB bother to become more acceptable to the half of Americans who are conservative?

The people at CPB are of course very liberal, but they’re also smart. They know they can demagogue this issue to no end by accusing grownups of trying to stab Big Bird and Elmo in the heart. Historical reference: See “Romney, Mitt.”

After years of hearing from conservatives — including The Heritage Foundation — that it is both unfair and unwise for a broadcaster to depend even partially on funds extracted involuntarily from taxpayers, NPR and PBS have done nothing to moderate their impartiality.

At issue is not just the subject matter they choose to cover — for example, the prominence they give to the identity politics of groups formed on ethnic, racial and gender bases.

The real problem is the news and cultural programming of both, but especially NPR, exhibit the worldview of, say, MSNBC. Except that MSNBC is private; conservative taxpayers don’t have to support it financially.

NPR has so clearly stopped trying to mend its ways that three years ago it brazenly named former ACLU official Jarl Mohn, who has given some $217,000 to Democratic candidates and causes, as its latest CEO.

Their only defense now is simply to deny the bias exists. And it always works for the leadership at CPB.

They know that Congressmen like Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) will always be there for them.

Cole chairs the House subcommittee that oversees funding for the CPB. Although he hails from one of the reddest states in the Union, he dismissed the budget’s elimination of the CPB’s regular $445 million subsidy. “There is a strong constituency for public broadcasting in both the House and the Senate,” he insisted.

Cole’s posture, incidentally, was also at variance with that of OMB Director Rick Mulvaney, who until very recently was his House colleague.

At a March 16 White House briefing, Mulvaney said of struggling hardworking Americans, “Can I really go to those folks, look them in the eye and say, look, I want to take money from you and I want to give it to the Corporation of Public Broadcasting? That is a really hard sell.” Indeed. But the folks on Capitol Hill are easy.

Even if NPR and PBS weren’t biased, there’s no reason for taxpayers to fund them. The government exists solely to guarantee our enumerated inalienable rights and to protect us from foreign enemies. Its intervention in the market only crowds out private philanthropy, which represents the lion’s share of its budget.

Unfortunately, there are always conservatives like Rep. Cole.