From Salon.com An elite press consortium made up of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and CNN also apparently handed the Bush administration another big favor this week when it indefinitely delayed making public the results of its Florida election recount. The long-awaited analysis of 200,000 disputed ballots from the presidential election was supposed to be published on Monday, but the Times quietly informed its readers in a Sunday essay by political reporter Richard Berke that the "move might have stoked the partisan tensions" and "now seems utterly irrelevant." A journalist involved in the project later told Inside.com, "There's a sense that now is not the time to be writing about something that might make it look like someone else should have been elected president."
The Times' decision to withhold information that is clearly the public's right to know is a startling one, and in its desire to avoid reopening potential wounds, more therapeutic than journalistic. In 1971, a much more divisive time in the nation's history, the Times was motivated more by First Amendment considerations than by appeals to a narrow patriotism when it pressed to publish the Pentagon Papers. In lifting the restraining order that the Nixon administration had brought against the Times, U.S. District Judge Murray Gurfein, a Nixon appointee, agreed that the paramount value for the press -- even in a time of heightened national security concerns -- must be the public's right to know. 2