In June 1995, hefty packages with identical contents arrived in the mailrooms of The Washington Post and The New York Times: typed copies of a document called “Industrial Society and Its Future,” with a note from an anonymous sender who said he would kill again, unless the newspapers published the manifesto in its entirety within 90 days.
The danger seemed believable. The author claimed to have been responsible for three deaths and dozens injured in a mail bombing campaign that had lasted for 17 years and became increasingly frequent. But if they gave in to the threat, how did the newspapers know that the bomber would keep his word—and whether other terrorists would make such demands in the future?
In September of that year, at the urging of the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the newspapers decided to publish it. Due to its ability to print during the week, The Post posted the manifesto as an eight-page appendix to differentiate it from the regular news and opinion sections; The Times covered half the costs of The Post.
The manifesto provided crucial clues to his identity, and six months and two weeks later, the Unabomber — Theodore Kaczynski, who died Saturday in a federal prison cell — was captured. But for many in the business, giving in to Mr. Kaczynski’s demands set a terrible precedent, undermining journalistic independence and doing the job of law enforcement.
“They don’t know who this guy is, they can’t sue him for breach of contract if he bombs again,” Jane Kirtley, then executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said during a roundtable discussion. discussion shortly after the publication of the manifesto. “They really made a pact with the devil when ultimately they have no control over what he will or will not do.”
The Newspaper Association of America found its membership evenly split. In a poll at the time, exactly half of the 200 publishers who responded said they would have drafted the manifesto, while the other half disagreed.
The Times and The Post made it clear that it was not an easy decision. It took them almost all of 90 days to think it over, and the choice was not left to the editors. Instead, the papers’ two publishers issued a joint statement saying they believed it could help save lives.
“No newspaper has a journalistic reason to print this,” said Donald E. Graham, then publisher of The Post. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The Times, agreed. “Like it or not, we’re turning our pages to a man who killed people,” he said. “But I am convinced that we are making the right choice among bad options.”
After Mr. Kaczynski’s death on Saturday, Len Downie, editor-in-chief of The Post in 1995, told the paper that his boss was finally vindicated when Mr. Kaczynski’s brother recognized the wording and tipped off the FBI.
It wasn’t the first time, and wouldn’t be the last, that the media struggled with whether to serve as a platform for material that could inspire others to take harmful actions or mislead the public. The temptation to publish can be great, especially when the documents can attract a lot of attention and have plausible news value.
BuzzFeed News garnered attention for publishing a file in 2017 containing explosive accusations about President Donald J. Trump, for example, although it was largely discredited years later. There is often great interest in the manifestos written by perpetrators of mass shootings, but news organizations now shy away from excerpts for fear of encouraging copycats.
“I think we’re having more conversations today about harm minimization, and I think that’s a good thing,” said Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Even in the 1990s, Dr. Culver, the ferocious debate in journalism circles seemed academic to much of the public, when a killer was on the loose and the newspapers might have the power to stop him. “My main memory from that time was people outside newsrooms saying, ‘Why was this a question?'”
At the same time, however, newspapers faced criticism—and sometimes lost readers’ trust—for being too close to the government. Insufficient critical coverage by The Times during the months leading up to the Iraq War in the early 2000s is an example of this. A second is the media’s failure to adequately investigate police department statements following the protests over the murder of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo.
John Watson, a journalism professor at American University’s School of Communication, said the papers should have allowed the Justice Department to buy an advertorial section for the manifesto, to meet Mr Kaczynski’s demands and make the at the same time separate it from editorial decision-making.
“Journalists should never be on the same side as the police,” said Dr. Watson. “Their ability to be watchdogs depends on the public believing that they will never sleep with the government. They will always be skeptical, even when it is clear that the government is right.”
Through a spokesman for the Times, Mr. Sulzberger finished an interview, delaying his remarks. His son, the current publisher of the Times, AG Sulzberger, recently published a lengthy meditation on the meaning and value of journalistic independence. He did not respond to an email asking if he would have made the same decision as his father.
