Answer: The Domestic Press is Cheaper, Because They’re Volunteers
Bob Tyrrell notes in JWR:
Over the weekend it was reported that the Bush administration has been laying plans to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. On Monday the Washington Post reported that “The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.” The Post knows this because its reporters laid hands on “internal military documents.” So now those documents and the controversy within the military surrounding them are known to the public, the world public.
This is minor compared to the big fuss that the press made about our wiretapping operations, in which they stopped just short of publishing a How-To guide for al-Qaeda on how to evade government eavesdropping.
This got me wondering: What exactly is the difference between 1) a domestic press that eagerly publishes whatever US military secrets it can find, and 2) a foreign country’s spy program?