On Friday night, hours before the U.S. military launched an operation in Venezuela, in which forces captured President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, The New York Times and The Washington Post learned of the plan.However, both held off publication for several hours after President Donald Trump\u2019s administration warned that reporting could endanger U.S. troops, as reported by the news publication Semafor.<\/p>\n
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised the decision in an interview with George Stephanopoulos for ABC News, stating that numerous factors had to line up in order for the operation to take place. Rubio thanked the media for choosing to hold their stories, or else \u201clives could have been lost.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the U.S. government is legally unable to force a publication to hold or drop a story due to First Amendment protections against censorship, many papers will decide to hold a story for some time if they believe its immediate publication will risk the lives of American soldiers, according to Edward Wasserman, a campus professor of journalism who focuses on media ethics.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that it\u2019s broadly understood that taking an action with a news story that will bring fairly foreseeable consequences and cause otherwise needless American deaths is something that most American news organizations would avoid,\u201d Wasserman said.<\/p>\n
As of press time, Venezuelan officials say at least 80 people were killed in the U.S. attack, including civilians and members of security forces, according to a recent report by the nonprofit Security Council Report.<\/p>\n
Mark Danner, a campus professor in English and journalism, points out that there is a tradition in journalism to hold stories at the request of the government when publishing has the potential to put U.S. forces in danger.<\/p>\n
He also noted that the decision to hold a story is not one that publications take lightly.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a very sticky situation because editors and publishers are not in the business of suppressing stories, they\u2019re in the business of publishing stories,\u201d Danner said. \u201cMaking the decision to suppress the story means taking the government at its word on what the cost of publishing a story might be.\u201d<\/p>\n
A publication\u2019s choice to hold a story due to the possibility of it risking the lives of American forces, like that of the U.S. military action in Venezuela, is largely dependent on the timing of when the information was given to the publication, according to Wasserman.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A situation where information is given far enough in advance that there is little risk of additional casualties is different from one in which publishing a story could harm an operation that is already in motion, Wasserman added.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
Additionally, holding a story can have political consequences, as it can shift how an operation plays out.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou are going against your chosen function, which is to publish the news, and in going against that chosen function, you\u2019re intervening in the political process and allowing the operation to take place,\u201d Danner said.<\/p>\n
Wasserman added that in a situation like this one, where the story was only held for a number of hours, there was little additional \u201cnews value\u201d or \u201ccivic value\u201d that would push the news outlets to publish the story during the operation, instead of holding it and publishing it shortly thereafter.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
However, Danner noted that decisions such as this one are never \u201ccut and dry.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDecisions like this are very difficult, and it\u2019s not as if you can simply make such a decision with certainty that it\u2019s right in every dimension,\u201d Danner said. \u201cAll decisions of this kind have downsides and upsides. So you\u2019re choosing the least bad option, not the best.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Friday night, hours before the U.S. military launched an operation in Venezuela, in which forces captured President…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":122127,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[8986,36479,64062,46488,64063,64061,143,145,144,8352,64064,42139,27098,32140,1695,149,9298],"class_list":["post-122126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-abc-news","tag-edward-wasserman","tag-george-stephanopoulos","tag-marco-rubio","tag-mark-danner","tag-nicols-maduro","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-secretary-of-state","tag-security-council-report","tag-semafor","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-the-washington-post","tag-trump-administration","tag-uc-berkeley","tag-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122126\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}