New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. On the Relevancy of “Prior Restraint” in the Digital Age

Here is an excerpt of his comments addressing the controversy surrounding The Times publication of a story about international banking data. He says that unlike the circumstances surrounding the publication of the Pentagon Papers some thirty years ago, prior consent no longer applies in today’s digital age:

Unfortunately, the sound quality makes it difficult to understand, so we’ve transcribed some of his comments from our video post:

“Under today’s rules [unintelligible] we could have put all of the papers on the web in one moment. There would be no reason for the government to ask for prior consent. Treason, yes, if that’s the way you want to take it, but prior constraint, no. Your ability to get all of your data out immediately does give us all a benefit. Now it’s not always a benefit – we published that story that you just mentioned, we put it out on the web, I’m gonna say roughly around 9, 9 pm a couple nights ago. The Wall Street Journal matched us at 10, the Los Angeles Times matched us at 11. So, you know, a scoop is a scoop for about a nanosecond now– but it’s a scoop.”

-- Andy Plesser

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