Veritas vs. truth

Monday, the New York Times asked a state appellate court to stay the ruling of a Westchester judge who took the extraordinary step of barring the newspaper from publishing documents that shine light on activist-provocateur James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. The Times is on firm ground; the judge, Charles Wood, was way out of order in seeking to prevent a newspaper from exposing information that’s in the public interest and which was obtained through normal reporting methods.

There are few absolutes in American constitutional law, but over generations of jurisprudence, it’s well established that except in the narrowest of circumstances, government may not preemptively suppress journalists from revealing information. The seminal case here was the New York Times’ 1971 reports on The Pentagon Papers, in which the executive branch claimed publication would harm soldiers in the field in an ongoing war. The Supreme Court said sorry: The First Amendment, which protects the press especially when it is acting in the public interest, safeguarded the right to publish.

Project Veritas’ methods have been the subject of intense debate; some decry their dishonesty, others defend their aggressive undercover techniques. (In an odd and dangerously relativistic passage in his ruling, Wood suggested that any notion of the public interest is nearly impossible to ascertain nowadays given that “roughly half the nation prioritizes interests that are vastly different from the other half.”) Times reporters obtained correspondence between the organization and its lawyers on how to engage in those practices without running afoul of the law.

Project Veritas now claims that the Times intends to expose these documents to gain advantage in a separate defamation lawsuit between it and the paper, but that’s a disingenuous dodge. The Times has yet to obtain any information through the discovery process in that suit.

In a parallel universe, Project Veritas would be suing an established left-leaning newspaper to try to expose its legal department’s advice to its reporters and editors. If that were to happen, we’d stand with Project Veritas. It’s the side of core American freedom.