At the end of the written article, NTK has the audacity to ask its readers to help them read the released documents. Why should we help you when this article is so clearly one sided?

We’re still laboring under an illegal invasion into Iraq that was certainly not aided by our “watchdog press”. During that previous eight year reign, we’ve been lied to about “national security” and in the meantime, have lost habeas corpus, rights of privacy, etc. What does Shelley Lewis think the Air America audience thinks of the Pentagon demanding Wikileaks return documents. How on earth does Shelley allow such a shallow, bootlicking segment to go on the air?

The man is actually arguing that the government should decide what can be released in all cases and what is “not damaging” and remains unchallenged on the fundamental truism that your government is not to be trusted to provide transparency on anything for any amount of time.

Not only that, he is equating Wikileaks protecting their sources with government lieing about what is essentially the policy set for use of untold public resources and resulting in hundreds of thousands dead civilians. How can he get to not be laughed out of the room at this point?

Disaster.

I had a week to listen to many insightful analysists on Democracy Now, Uprisisng Radio, Counterspin, and Anand Gopal on Pacifica. The Need to Know segment was laughable. A mere echo of the Obama administration’s prostestations about harmful this is and “no new revelations.”David Leigh editor of the Guardian explained to Amy Goodman on July 27, “…going to take out names that we thought might be in danger of reprisals. And we decided not to publish certain intelligence reports that describe that kind of thing. So all those decisions had been taken.” “He, (Assange) too, agreed that it will be a good thing to redact anything that might endanger sources. And because he planned to publish the entire database, not just selected data that had been studied in advance, like us, he’s had to hold back 15,000, he says, for review to see what the problems might be.”

Please dispense with him, and please also try to have multiple guests for each segment with informed opposing views who may debate each other, or, where there is only one guest, please have the hosts offer arguments that those with opposing views have put forth, (as Bill Moyers often did), so we may hear the guest respond to them, the better for we, the viewers, to appraise the guest’s own comments as either well-founded or specious, serious or self-interested, thought-through or merely scripted.

Even NTK’s comedian echoed Foust’s side of the story. Puh-lease! If this is the new face of PBS Friday “alternative” news, I think we are in a bit of trouble. I find the general informational atmosphere of the show to be rather light and twittery, despite the seriousness of many of the stories. If I want light, I’ll watch The Daily Show. Youth in the U.S. and Canada (where I watch) are perfectly capable of taking in serious news without falling asleep. The trend to be trendy is dumbing down and forgetting lessons that should have been learned from your predecessors in the time slot. I hope that the WikiLeaks story will be expanded upon on Need To Know in the future. But, most importantly, from various approaches, facets and angles of view.

You are a new show replacing the great Bill Moyers. You are in the position of trying to attain your credibility. Bringing on this “Military Analyst” and presenting him as the expert on the Wikileaks and whether it was harmful or helpful, while in the same breath mentioning Ellsberg seemed 1) a stupid programming decision, or 2) a cynical attempt to manipulate your audience. And blows your credibility.

Why didn’t you have Ellsberg on at least to present another view of it. This guy Joshua Foust has business and political interests he is promoting and instead of introducing him as a “military analyst” why didn’t you introduce him under his own self professed title: “Senior Intelligence Analyst at Northrop Grumman Information Systems”. He works for Grumman! A HUGE military contractor. Of course he will tell us this leak was harmful It was harmful to proponents of the war and the companies that make money off the war, like his real employer Grumman.

A simple Google search which your producers could have done turned up his work profile on Link’ed In, in which he identifies himself as a Grumman employee, May 2009 to “present”.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuafoust