Good newspapers, and Stars and Stripes is one, don’t try to push any political or cultural agenda in the news columns. Sure, the selection of what goes in a paper comes from the personal judgments of the editors. The choice is supposed to be based on the relative importance of what is to be reported, and what you’d expect the readers’ interests to be. But readers bring their own points of view to the process, and then there can be a conflict. That’s what’s happened with some stories Stripes ran this month.

As long as there are official secrets, there will be those who will reveal them — anonymously. That distresses people in authority, but also some ordinary citizens. You may think that the media, on the other hand, would cheer. Not necessarily.

In the first place, editors have to struggle with whether the revelation is harmful to national security or overridingly in the public interest. And, secondly, they have to face running a story based on information provided by “anonymous sources.” Those two words have hung like a dark cloud over the media in recent years; newspapers raced to tighten rules on the use of unnamed sources after notoriously fake articles appeared in several publications, including The New York Times and my alma mater, USA Today.