Over the past six months or so, the Atlantic has been assembling more and more reporting talent, including by poaching some of the biggest stars from the troubled Washington Post.

One of the best intelligence reporters in the country is Shane Harris, who moved from the Post to the Atlantic last summer.

Harris shared the byline this week on the Atlantic’s shocking scoop, in which top editor Jeffrey Goldberg inadvertently was given access to a group text where top US officials were planning a strike in Yemen.

Before they published and at every step along the way, the Atlantic conferred with knowledgable lawyers about how to proceed. The journalists revealed what they had in stages, and carefully.

The Atlantic thus was a model of caution and good judgment.

“Jeff Goldberg and The Atlantic handled the whole thing perfectly,” Martin Baron, the renowned editor who led the Washington Post newsroom until 2021, told me in an email on Thursday.

The journalists’ actions “could be a college journalism class in careful, ethical handling of sensitive information”, said David Boardman, dean of Temple University’s media school.

The contrast was sharp between those well-considered measures and the dangerous negligence at the highest level of the

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