According to Liptak, "news organizations used to consider those kinds of lawsuits a matter of civic responsibility":

"For the last four decades, maybe longer, citizens have been able to rely on small, medium and large news organizations, mostly newspapers, to fight their access battles on their behalf," said Lucy Dalglish, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press....

These days, she said, "the access litigations have dried up."

It is notable, for instance, that the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups have taken the leading role in trying to shake loose information about the Bush administration's policies and actions, while news organizations have largely sat on the sidelines.

Also notable are exactly which public interests the Times usually wields its own considerable budget in favor of--still, its valuable, if disconcerting, to read Adam Liptak reporting that the Press-Enterprise is now "so strapped that it’s quit distributing free copies of the paper to staff members in the city room."

This specific article is even worse than the usual one of its type, since it's particularly uncritical in passing along administration claims without any skepticism.... Worse, the article does not provide any information about the Obama officials whose mission the reporters are dutifully carrying out, so there's no way to assess their motives.

Those journalistic practices produce egregious sentences like this: "'Civil liberties groups have encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order,' the official said."

Greenwald would really "love to know which so-called 'civil liberties groups' are pushing the White House for an executive order establishing the power of indefinite detention," telling us that "it's certainly not the ACLU or Center for Constitutional Rights, both of which issued statements vehemently condemning the proposal."