Why the L.A. Times ran the bank story

Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet explains today why he decided to publish the story about the Bush Administration's monitoring of bank transactions.

Baquet says nobody in the government convinced the paper that the risks of exposing the program outweighed the people's need to know.

We sometimes withhold information when we believe that reporting it would threaten a life. In this case, we believed, based on our talks with many people in the government and on our own reporting, that the information on the Treasury Department's program did not pose that threat. Nor did the government give us any strong evidence that the information would thwart true terrorism inquiries. In fact, a close read of the article shows that some in the government believe that the program is ineffective in fighting terrorism.

He adds that aggressive investigation of the actions of the government is nothing less than a constitutional imperative for the news media.

History has taught us that the government is not always being honest when it cites secrecy as a reason not to publish. No one believes, in retrospect, that there was any true reason to withhold the Pentagon Papers, although the government fought vigorously to keep them from being published by the New York Times and the Washington Post. As Justice Hugo Black put it in that case: "The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic."