His publish-or-perish gambit worked. No getting around it - the Unabomber has pulled off a successful extortion of The New York Times and The Washington Post. Under threat of more killing, he got the newspapers to publish - in a special section of Tuesday's Post - his 35,000-word diatribe detailing his view that technology has nearly ruined the human race and the natural environment.
That's highly debatable. What's not is that 17 years of mail-bomb terrorism by the Unabomber has ruined many innocent lives. Will publication really stop the killing? Will it only encourage copycat actions by wannabombers? Is it ever OK to do business with a terrorist? What about journalism ethics? These are some of the questions fired back at the papers' publishers as the Unabomber's manifesto hit the streets. Both Post Publisher Donald E. Graham and Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said they had acted solely to save lives.Taking the hard line is easy. Newspapers shouldn't routinely turn over their pages to criminals. Newspapers shouldn't casually buddy up to cops or the FBI. Any reporter not born a skeptic becomes one. But newspapers aren't ivory towers. They're flesh-and-blood actors in the real world.
Balancing ideals and lives is never easy. But if even one life is at stake, spilling a little ink isn't so bad.
San Francisco Examiner