This vignette in Bill Keller's speech for The Guardian last week caught my eye:
President Kennedy was furious at [David] Halberstam's aggressive reporting from the battlefields of Vietnam, and he complained to the publisher at the time, Punch Sulzberger, the father of our current publisher. Maybe, the president suggested, the Times should send Mr Halberstam to London or Paris. Punch Sulzberger was pretty new in the job, and had never encountered an angry president before, but he firmly declined. Then, and this is the part I love, when he got back to the office Punch sent Halberstam instructions to cancel his upcoming vacation. The publisher didn't want the White House to see Halberstam heading for the airport and get the idea that the Times was giving in.
It's a wonderful story meant to rally the troops -- to show the power of a financially healthy, civic-minded Times Company -- the Times of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and New York Times Co. v. United States, that as Keller says, is our "institutional bulwark against powerful forces that would tame or silence us."
There's only one problem with this vignette today. When I think of the company that's really sticking it in the eye of the powerful, fighting today's Sullivan, I don't think of the NYT. I think of Google.
Yes, as Keller points out, The Times is still fighting the Bush Administration for its disclosure in 2005 of National Security Agency wiretapping. That is a huge, important battle, but to me it feels more abstract than than the battles Google is fighting.
Google is the one pushing for net neutrality so that 9Neighbors can germinate without getting squashed by the Comcast Bundle. Google is the one fighting to make sure Verizon doesn't control the information I read and write from my mobile devices.
Google is no replacement for newspapers. Their record in China is spotty, and they certainly aren't doing the critical dirty work of FOIA requests and lawsuits that are still routine at places like the News-Press in Forth Myers, Fla.
That said, old-liners like Keller need to respect Google's values. Google is being built on precisely the same set of assumptions that The Times was built on -- that access to information makes our society better off.
The difference is only in scale: The Times publishes information itself, while Google enables everybody to publish information.
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