An Empty Seat in the Courtroom
THE lawyer David Coombs rarely speaks publicly outside the courtroom. He says that his client, Bradley Manning, the Army private accused of leaking secret documents to WikiLeaks, prefers it that way.
But last Monday night at a Unitarian Church in Washington, Coombs made an exception. He spoke to a crowd of Manning supporters, thanking those who were present, as well as a larger group: the 14,000 people who have contributed to Private Manning's defense fund, including Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistle-blower, who has called the soldier a hero. Private Manning, charged with making public hundreds of thousands of secret documents, many of them related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, faces the possibility of life in prison.
It was part of a fascinating few days in the history of the Manning story - resonating with implications for free speech, national security and the American military at war - but you wouldn't have known much about it if your only source of information was The New York Times. The Times didn't cover Mr. Coombs's remarks and, far more important, did not send a staff reporter to the first eight days of a pretrial hearing in the case, including riveting testimony by Private Manning.
As a matter of news judgment, giving so little coverage to the hearing is simply weird. This is a compelling story, and an important one.
It has human drama - a young soldier, accused of transferring state secrets to WikiLeaks and harshly imprisoned since the spring of 2010, speaking publicly about his case for the first time since his arrest - and it goes to the heart of contentious media issues in which The New York Times has played an important role, publishing much information revealed through Private Manning's act.
Why did readers of The Times have to turn to Ed Pilkington of The Guardian, or to one of the great number of other news organizations that sent reporters, to hear Private Manning tell of the Mordor into which he had been drawn - where he had to stand naked, in chains, in the “maximum custody†brig at Quantico, Va., imploring his prison guards for something as simple as toilet paper, or, earlier, in a “cage†in Kuwait?
The newspaper's absence was noticed, and criticized, by many media watchers. Beyond the story itself, The Times, which considers itself the paper of record, had an obligation to be there - to bear witness - because, in a very real sense, Private Manning was one of its most important sources of the past decade.
“The New York Times got amazing, fantastic, unparalleled material for news stories from Bradley Manning,†Mr. Ellsberg told The New Republic's Eliza Gray.
To its credit, The Times published article after article based on the very information that Private Manning provided to WikiLeaks, just as it had published the Pentagon Papers that Mr. Ellsberg leaked during the Vietnam War.
The situations aren't equal: Private Manning may not have had the same clear-cut whistle-blower's motivation that Mr. Ellsberg had as an antiwar activist, and some are insistent in portraying him as a mentally unstable traitor to his military vows. But neither are the two situations unrelated, especially given The Times's role as a lead publisher of the leaked information in both cases.
Last Wednesday, puzzled by The Times's lack of coverage (it had run only an 11-paragraph article from The Associated Press), I asked senior editors why there had been no Times reporter at the hearing, held at Fort Meade, Md. Dean Baquet, a managing editor, referred me to David Leonhardt, the Washington bureau chief, who responded in an e-mail.
Mr. Leonhardt explained that The Times had already covered the most important aspects of the testimony, Mr. Manning's treatment in solitary confinement - referring to two articles that appeared 19 months ago.
“We've covered him and will continue to do so,†Mr. Leonhardt wrote. “But as with any other legal case, we won't cover every single proceeding. In this case, doing so would have involved multiple days of a reporter's time, for a relatively straightforward story.†The A.P. article, he said, “conveyed fundamentally the same material as a staff story would have.â€
He added, “Readers can definitely expect more coverage of Mr. Manning in the weeks to come.â€
I was glad that the Times got into the game, even if very late, with a reporter in the courtroom on Friday for the ninth day of the hearing, and a catch-up article on the front page on Saturday.
The Times sometimes plays down the importance of public events, believing more strongly in its own enterprising journalism. One such example was its coverage of the Congressional hearings on the consulate attack in Libya, which The Times chose not to put on Page 1 - a decision I disagreed with, and wrote about in October. Such decisions seem to say: “It's news when we say it's news.â€
Sometimes it makes sense to favor exclusive, enterprise reporting over a public event. But the two are not mutually exclusive. If there had been a will to cover the Manning testimony, a staff reporter could have been found.
What's more, the decision not to send a staff reporter to the hearing for so long also contained an interesting pre-calculation: that the early coverage would not be considered as front-page news. The Times, after all, does not use wire-service articles on its front page, except in highly unusual circumstances involving fast-breaking and unexpected news.
Perhaps, as Mr. Leonhardt suggested, his bureau is working on something better. The Times's Washington reporters do outstanding and groundbreaking investigative reporting. I hope that something significant is in the works. It might begin to make more sense of a decision that is otherwise hard to understand.
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A version of this op-ed appeared in print on December 9, 2012, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: An Empty Seat in the Courtroom.