Truth or Security?

Sen. Arlen Specter knows more than he says:

Specter, R-Pa., said the nation’s eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion is more dire than the pub­lic has been told, but did not elaborate.

“Our eco­nomic prob­lems are enor­mously seri­ous — more seri­ous than is pub­licly dis­closed. And I think we’re on the brink of a depres­sion,” he told reporters at the state Capitol.

When I was a staff reporter for The Boston Courant, I cov­ered a sen­si­tive issue: ground­wa­ter. Many homes in down­town Boston rest on under­ground wood piles that are sub­merged in water. If the water lev­els fall, as had been hap­pen­ing, then the wood begins to rot, and the foun­da­tions of the home can become sig­nif­i­cantly damaged.

For one par­tic­u­lar story, I was going to dis­cuss how the ground­wa­ter might cause local prop­erty val­ues to fall. When the edi­tor saw my draft, he became absolutely livid and yelled in that spe­cial way that only jour­nal­ists can. He said that if I men­tion that issue, which was a rea­son­able con­cern, then local res­i­dents might panic — forc­ing prop­erty val­ues to fall any­way. In addi­tion, angry prop­erty own­ers might have sued the newspaper.

In pol­i­tics and jour­nal­ism, there is always ten­sion between the val­ues of truth and secu­rity. Should I report about groundwater’s affect on prop­erty val­ues or keep the con­cerns of local res­i­dents in mind? Should the New York Times report Osama bin Laden’s speeches and state­ments even though they might con­tain coded instruc­tions to his fol­low­ers? Should the fed­eral gov­ern­ment tell the Amer­i­can peo­ple exactly how bad the U.S. econ­omy is going to become even though it might stoke panic and a rush to sell what­ever finan­cial assets peo­ple have?

It seems that Spec­tor, as well as most gov­ern­ment offi­cials and mem­bers of Con­gress, know the depth of the prob­lems that the United States is fac­ing. But how much should they tell the Amer­i­can people?