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Certainly, nobody at the New York Times went to jail because, again, journalists don’t go to jail for publishing classified information in the United States.

By Tom Woods

The British High Court will soon decide whether to extradite journalist Julian Assange to the United States, where he will assuredly face a long prison sentence.

It is shocking to me that anyone who reads what I write could side with the regime on this.

The University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer recently summarized the situation, and this is my analysis as well:

Assange is a journalist, and he did not break the law, as it is commonplace for journalists to publish classified information that is passed on to them by government insiders. If journalists in the United States were sent to jail for publishing classified material, the jails would be filled with many of America’s most famous reporters from newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

But of course, that hardly ever happens. Simply put, newspapers publish classified material, and hardly anybody ever goes to jail. Why is this the case? What is the reason for this situation? Governments of every type, and this includes liberal democracies like the United States and Britain, sometimes go to great lengths to hide their actions or their policies from public view, which makes it almost impossible for the public to evaluate and criticize their behavior….

Thus, a rich tradition has developed over time in the United States, where insiders leak information about classified policies to journalists who publicize the information so that the public can evaluate it and push back hard against misguided policies.

The most famous case that illustrates this phenomenon involves the famous Pentagon Papers, which were a multi-volume study of the American decision to enter the war in Vietnam in the 1964-65 period and then escalated in subsequent years.

Daniel Ellsberg, who was an insider and had access to classified material, leaked the papers in 1971 to The New York Times, which subsequently published them. The story in those documents was starkly at odds with what the Johnson administration had been telling the American people about US policy in Vietnam.

By most accounts at the time, and certainly since then, both Ellsberg and The New York Times performed an important public service…. Ellsberg did not go to jail despite leaking classified information, although it did appear at the time that he might be sent to jail. Certainly, nobody at the New York Times went to jail because, again, journalists don’t go to jail for publishing classified information in the United States.

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