From Trump to Manchester, the reason to publish secrets is the same

It’s a long, difficult road from Franklin Square, DC, to the Manchester Arena, but everything connects. And here, starting that journey, is Marty Baron, the increasingly feted editor of the Washington Post.

“Investigative reporting is absolutely critical to our business model. We add value. We tell people what they didn’t already know. We hold government and powerful people and institutions accountable. This cannot happen without financial support. We’re at the point where the public realises this and is willing to step up and support that work by buying subscriptions.”

Which is why April’s comScore figures for the Post show that it can now boast 78.7 million unique users and 811m digital page views, trailing only the New York Times among newspaper sites on the American continent. Last year, at long last, after many grim years, the paper claimed to be making undisclosed profits while its new owner, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, hired hundreds more journalists and computer experts.

Why the surge of confidence – also clearly felt at the New York Times, with 308,000 extra digital subscribers in three months primed with the “rocket fuel of Trump”, according to its chief executive? Simple. Because the Post and the Times are the key investigators who, time and again, are bringing the president of the United States down to Earth. They break new, incendiary stories almost day by day. They feed on leaks from within the White House and security community.

Watch American TV news, with all its resources, reduced to following where these two newspapers (plus sites in the Mother Jones and Guardian bracket) lead. These are the champions of democratic scrutiny. Loyal to the constitution, diligent for truth, they are the true opposition.

But wait a second. Something’s out of joint here. If you start this trek from the devastation of the arena, this equation looks very different.

Now the New York Times is under heavy fire for “telling people what they don’t already know”. Now, in a rich parody of reality, the prime minister is complaining to Donald Trump about US security leaks – names, networks, bomb-making techniques. Now there are some leaks we approve of and some we bristle over (with newspapers that ought to know better forgetting first principles and joining the charge).

All very curious. Back in the UK, newspapers are perennially protesting against more surveillance restrictions, more security blankets, more police “rights” to snoop or hide. Here comes an Official Secrets Act that wants to throw journalists in prison. It’s common ground that we live in a secretive society, and that the more the mists gather, the greater the risk to democracy. Freedoms wither in the dark.

You don’t need Chelsea Manning, emerging from US prison the other day, to remind you that secrecy can’t flourish in the era of WikiLeaks – or that resourceful newspapers on different continents increasingly share information between themselves in order to publish with relative impunity. Remember Snowden and the Panama Papers. In small, law-locked lands, you’d have heard nothing of them. But 2017 is a wholly changed, much more information-charged world. There is no international law of online operation. There is only a constant, and naturally frail, search for the light switch.

No one can be sure how much harm, if any, early leaking of British details to American papers has done – just as the havoc allegedly wreaked by Manning remains oddly vague. Our police like “taking control”, of course. They are, if anything, more controlling since their Leveson embarrassments. But retentive isolation is an attitude, not a policy.

America’s police operate differently in a different, more open society. Paris police work by different rules again. There are always journalists asking questions, but there are no set global regulations on the taking-control front. That’s today’s world – a world where information is king, where knowledge drives, where the public’s right to know in times of terror is insistent.

This isn’t an easy argument, to be sure. After total horrors like the carnage in Manchester, there’s a natural rush to support the police and MI5 as they hunt the bombers. It’s assumed that the silence they want can be maintained, even as the news itself – and the horror – ripples round the world. But no: that’s less and less practical.

The New York Times says it acted quite normally and with the greatest care. It was doing what it takes to be its job – the same job that holds, as central belief, that news belongs on a page or screen, not hidden from public sight.

A difficult line to hold when emotions are raw. But if you’re going to lecture the great, grey lady of New York about responsibility, you have a duty to spell out why real harm, forgotten a few hours later, may be done by naming names and printing photos.

That’s missing from this argument. Indeed, the spread of information about those involved in this terrible plot proceeds apace with “significant” arrests and “important” discoveries – maybe faster than they might have done under cover of darkness.

It seems a good time to stop feeding Donald Trump ammunition, then – and a good time, too, to forget distractions that land on a Manhattan breakfast table. You can’t hold “governments and powerful people and institutions to account” if you just keep quiet. Nor can you unite people against the reality of terror if you leave the details out.