BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Oops, they did it again.

GEORGE W. BUSH: The disclosure of this program is disgraceful. For a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: President Bush, Vice-President Cheney and most Republicans in Congress are angry at The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, but mostly The New York Times for writing a front page piece offering details of the program by which the government tracks terrorists by following their money. Critics say that the media have put lives at risk because, as Ohio Republican Mike Oxley put it:

MIKE OXLEY: What's the average terrorist to think? He's going to find a different way to move his money around. That's what he's going to do.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What The Times and the other news outlets reported was that the government was tracking the global banking industry, about six trillion dollars daily, through a Belgian cooperative called Swift, this despite the urgings of White House officials who claimed that disclosure could jeopardize the program's effectiveness.

BOB GARFIELD: On Thursday, the House of Representatives voted along party lines to pass a non-binding resolution expecting, quote, "the cooperation of all news media organizations in protecting the lives of Americans and the capability of the government to identify, disrupt and capture terrorists by not disclosing classified intelligence programs. Michigan Democrat John Dingle said the resolution was conceived in sin, brought forth without hearings, discussion, or the opportunity to amend.

JOHN DINGLE: The end result? The opinion has to be that this is a clear bald-faced attempt to strangle criticism of this Administration.

BOB GARFIELD: And especially, it seems, to strangle The New York Times. The L.A. Times and the Wall Street Journal, with its staunchly conservative editorial page, have not come in for the same opprobrium. MSNBC's Chris Matthews has his own theory as to why.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Why is the president going after just The New York Times? It's the old trick. Go after New York, go after big ethnic New York that never votes Republican. Blame everything on them.

BOB GARFIELD: Heather Mac Donald, a fellow with the conservative Manhattan Institute, says The Times was the first to publish, and in so doing, pushed the other papers to print. But Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet wrote in his editor's notes much the same as The New York Times editor Bill Keller wrote in his, that the Administration didn't make a convincing case for holding the story and that the legitimate public interest outweighed the potential risk. That doesn't persuade McDonald, who declared in the Weekly Standard that, quote, "The New York Times is a national security threat." She joins us now. Heather, welcome to On the Media.

HEATHER Mac DONALD: Thanks for having me, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: You went nuts when you saw this story. [LAUGHS] You were very upset and you suggested that The Times has, in your words, blown the cover on this terror-tracking initiative. Now, The New York Times has also run the National Security Agency's story, which seemed to be substantially more cover-blowing. I mean, why were you so aggravated about this episode?

HEATHER Mac DONALD: Because I see absolutely no credible argument that this was an illegal program. The National Security Agency program, I think there was a plausible argument that it was a violation of FISA. This, however, was following a duly enacted Congressional statute that allows the tracking of international financial transactions. So for The Times to reveal this program to me suggests that there is not a single covert program that is safe from revelations. If The Times feels authorized to reveal a lawful covert action, I see no reason why if it gets wind of a wiretap on Osama bin Laden's phone, it doesn't reveal that, or if it knows that we have informants placed within al Qaeda, that it doesn't reveal that.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, this program had been discussed in public, including by the president himself, for literally years before The Times gave us all of the nitty-gritty details, so terrorists who are moving money around the world certainly know that their money movements are being monitored anyway. Exactly what national security harm has taken place here?

HEATHER Mac DONALD: The fact that there may be some abstract general awareness that surveillance is a possibility really does not make a difference to criminals in the ordinary course of events. Mafia dons themselves know that their phones may be wiretapped. They talk on the phone all the time. This program, by The Times' own admission, was absolutely critical to picking up Hambali, who was the mastermind of the Bali 2002 resort bombings. It also helped get a Brooklyn man who was involved in a wire transfer for al Qaeda that went through a Karachi bank. So the fact is, is that terrorists are as sloppy as the rest of us, and easily overlook the abstract possibility that they may be surveilled.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, there is another possibility – that The Times simply overplayed the story.

HEATHER Mac DONALD: Well, you had a bipartisan parade of people coming through The Times begging them not to run this story. You have Lee Hamilton of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean of the 9/11 Commission, John Murtha, saying that this is, in fact, something critical to our national security. So, again, explain to me why any other covert action is now safe from revelation by The New York Times on the front page.

BOB GARFIELD: Point taken, Heather. But you know darn well that The New York Times and many other news organizations often have very sensitive information at their disposal that they do not publish for exactly the reason that you're citing. The question is The New York Times' judgment of overreaching by the government versus the government's reflexive claims of national security. Do you not think that at some point, enough skepticism can legitimately build up that would make a news organization question the government's judgment about what constitutes a genuine breach of national security?

HEATHER Mac DONALD: Every case has to be judged on its merits. Cash, the flow of money internationally, is the lifeblood of terrorism. Whether there's a growing skepticism is, frankly, irrelevant to the case at hand. I've yet to see The Times make any arguments, nor have you, as to what in this program is overreaching. What The Times did say was that there is a possibility of abuse. That is true for every single government program that exists. That possibility that this program could be abused is not, in my view, ground for ending it or for publishing it on the front page of The New York Times, thereby disabling it. But the power of the press can also be abused, as we've seen, in my view, in The New York Times, and we should have checks and balances, which is public opinion.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, Heather. Well, thank you so much.

HEATHER Mac DONALD: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Heather Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal. Scott Armstrong is the founder of the government watchdog group, Information Trust. He says that Bill Keller had no need to apologize for running the Swift story, but the paper did probably overplay it.

SCOTT ARMSTRONG: So the headlines were all wrong: Bank Data Sifted by U.S. in Secret to Block Terror. It's the wrong headline. It's not a covert program.

BOB GARFIELD: The critics claimed that national security was breached and that the war on terror was compromised by The Times and the L.A. Times and the Wall Street Journal. Does that claim have any merit?

SCOTT ARMSTRONG: I don't see any merit at all in it. There are two, maybe three basic ways of transferring money, and you have to go through these gating mechanisms. You know, only a fool who had never cashed a check, who is basically paying their bills in gold bullion or something - no one else would think they could escape the scrutiny that this would give. This organization's been around way before 9/11. It has been identified as the principal way of tracking money laundering for drugs, for organized crime, even for the earlier terrorist events prior to 9/11. So the whole notion that it's secret and that this is a big revelation is just absolutely puzzling.

BOB GARFIELD: All right. So, now, that said, the Administration and many commentators on the political right and members of Congress went absolutely ballistic, you know, as if troop movements and the invasion plans for D-Day had been revealed in advance. Why are they so upset?

SCOTT ARMSTRONG: This is unusually shrill. This does not reflect any reasonable measure of damage. I just think people are embarrassed that they didn't realize that they're doing it and may even be doing it well. My suspicion is if the government had stayed with their original tack, which is -- hey, this was authorized, it was authorized before 9/11, authorized after 9/11, we're doing it in accord with the law, Congress knows about it, everybody knows about it -- and they just stuck with that, The Times might have run some story about questions about whether or not it's become too broad, or it's become more of a database that's being manipulated, rather than just subpoenas of information. It would have run on page A-23 on a Tuesday somewhere. Nobody would have noticed it.

BOB GARFIELD: I was trying to figure out why they gave such prominent display to the story, and it seems to me that it has to do with the pattern of behavior by the Administration in its war on terror, and that is, you know, consistent overreaching – in Guantanamo, with renditions of terrorist suspects to countries where they are subsequently tortured, to the NSA wiretaps. Do you think that, had this been an isolated example, The New York Times or any other news organization would have paid much attention at all?

SCOTT ARMSTRONG: I think it's in the context, that people recognize that the watchdogs aren't watching, because we know that Congress has not been particularly able to inquire into it or particularly interested in inquiring into it. That's the real news in here, is that the government says this is being monitored by an outside auditor. Okay. So who is it? Under what strictures? With what standards? You know, they don't have to tell us how to defeat the system, but they have to give the public confidence. And that's the job of journalists. The job of journalists in a nation of laws is to understand the law and understand what's outside the law and to understand when the law is getting stretched. And too much of these stories end up being speculative. Some people who don't know much about the program think it might be going too far. They needed to do more reporting and to kind of put us in the perspective of what's important and why is it important and why is it newsworthy and what should we be watching? Our government can fight a war on terror but they can do it in a way that doesn't threaten the average citizen.

BOB GARFIELD: So if this was a case of newspapers just newspapering, why do you suppose that Times executive editor Bill Keller went to [LAUGHS] such great lengths to explain, defend, in effect, apologize for the story almost simultaneous with its publication?

SCOTT ARMSTRONG: I think The Times is particularly sensitive about: ‘Is this classified? If it were classified, did we do the right thing? People are telling us we shouldn't publish it, but we didn't really think that they were too serious about it.’ That's a very slippery slope to get on. There does not appear to be classified information in their story. The Times doesn't need to justify itself on those issues. It should be worried about the quality of its journalism. Criticizing the press for this is appropriate if you say they made too much of it, but you should never say that they shouldn't report it. You can question whether that's news, but you shouldn't question about whether it should be suppressed. That would be ludicrous.

BOB GARFIELD: Scott Armstrong is founder of the government watchdog group, Information Trust.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, flag desecration through the ages, and the positive side of negative political advertising.

BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media from NPR.