Issues Swirl Around Journalist’s Jailing Over Source Secrecy

A complicated and shadowy story has suddenly gotten more complicated and shadowy.

Under pressure and threat from the courts, a journalist reveals a protected source. Another refuses and is hustled to jail. Another high profile journalist involved in the case seemingly faces nothing. Rumors grow that perhaps the President’s right-hand man and political mentor is the source prosecutors are trying to identify.

Some call for federal shield laws to protect journalists who don’t want to reveal sources (fat chance in this political climate). Reporters and publishers cringe at the issue. Some insist it will have a chilling effect and diminish investigative, whistle-blower sourced news.

It’s all in a day — a day with strange twists as a journalist who has long been believed to enjoy warm infoties to the White House gets marched off to spend time behind bars that is likely to be harder than that experienced by Martha Stewart:

A federal judge ordered New York Times reporter Judith Miller to an Alexandria jail yesterday after she again refused to cooperate in an investigation of whether senior administration officials leaked a CIA operative’s name in retaliation against an administration critic.

In a last-minute surprise, Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper avoided Miller’s fate by agreeing in the same court hearing to cooperate with special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s probe.

Cooper told the judge that he said goodbye to his 6-year-old son yesterday morning and was expecting to go to jail for as long as four months. But minutes later he received a surprise phone call from his government source, who, Cooper said, freed him to break their confidentiality agreement and to tell a grand jury about their conversations in July 2003….

This battle centered on questions about President Bush’s justification for taking the country to war, the reputations of two top media organizations, and allegations that someone in a bitter White House broke the law to strike back at a public critic.

It also posed painful questions for the press about whether journalists have falsely assumed that they have an absolute legal right to promise anonymity to sources. Ultimately, the case even led to a philosophical rift within the Fourth Estate, with Time magazine yielding to Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan’s order to turn over Cooper’s reporting notes and Times editors saying the magazine was wrong to do so.

The Washington Post has an extensive editorial on this case which opens with this:

The jailing of New York Times reporter Judith Miller yesterday in an attempt to force her to testify about a source is a damaging blow to the press’s ability to do its job. Ms. Miller has refused to testify before the grand jury investigating the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity as a covert CIA operative, and the federal courts have ruled against her claims of privilege. Yet while special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald was legally entitled to take action against her, his judgment in doing so is highly questionable. We don’t yet know how compelling are the facts underlying this extraordinary sanction. They are still mostly secret. But unless Mr. Fitzgerald is preparing to bring a case of great public importance to which Ms. Miller’s testimony is indispensable, her jailing will appear as a serious abuse of prosecutorial discretion and a gratuitous assault on press freedom.

The Seattle-Post Intelligencer calls for a federal shield law and adds:

Another strange twist in this story is that the journalist who first “outed” Plame in his column, conservative commentator Robert Novak, apparently faces no jail time, no contempt charge, none of the pressure Hogan and federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald have placed on Cooper and Miller. Does Novak enjoy his own personal shield for being a White House toady?

After all, the presumed motive of the “two senior (Bush) administration officials” who exposed Plame to Novak and other journalists was to punish her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who blew the whistle on President Bush’s Niger-sold-uranium-to-Iraq part of the justification for going to war.

Indeed, the irony in this is that Miller has a long career and has often come under fire for her stories about Sadaam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction leading up to the Iraq war. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that editors and reporters are divided over the repercussions of this case — which isn’t surprising since the press is not monolithic.

Impact?

(1)It will make editors and reporters think twice before rushing a story in to print.

(2)It will discourage sources who demand anonymity to think twice before contacting the press.

(3)A sub-controversy in this case will be if Bush’s political Svengali Karl Rove is in any way implicated.

Should that come out, then stories of the issue of press freedom will likely be dwarfed by “horserace coverage” as Rove’s forces go on the counterattack to protect him — and and Rove’s critics try to use this against him. And note that all of this will come within the context of one (likely TWO) acrimonious battle over a Supreme Court seat.

BUT THAT’S JUST OUR REACTION. Here are some other views (a cross section):
–Jeff Jarvis:

I’ll likely be drummed out of the corps of journalism (if I haven’t been already and, if I have, what the hell, I’m not a joiner) but I’ve come to see that Time Inc. Editor in Chief Pearlstine did the hard thing, probably the right thing. The easy thing for him to do would have been to defy the court, stand by the journalistic orthodoxy, refuse to hand over the subpoened documents, lump fines that wouldn’t mean diddly to Time Warner, and go into the J-Hall of Fame on the back of his jailed reporter, Matthew Cooper. The hard thing to do was to defy the orthodoxy and conclude that, indeed, news organizations are not above the law. If the law is an ass, then change the law; that’s what we do in this country.

–Crooks And Liars has a round up.
–David Sirota:”Are we really supposed to believe that Bob Novak’s archconservative political leanings and overt willingness to suck up to the GOP power structure has no bearing on the government letting him walk away from this mess? And are we really to believe that as Novak walks away, a writer who never actually published the classified information in question and who works at the New York Times – a paper conservatives love to vilify – is the real criminal?”
–JustOneMinute has a fascinating post that must be read IN FULL. A small taste 4 U:”If Mr. Fitzgerald believes he has received a waiver from Ms. Miller’s source, presumably he also believes he knows who Ms. Miller’s source might be. And maybe we do too – if we can trust our news resources, Mr. Cooper was protecting some other source, and Ms. Miller is protecting Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff.”
–The Mighty Middle:”NYT reporter Judith Miller is in jail as I write this. Don’t tell me women can’t have balls.”
–Project Nothing has a GREAT roundup.
–Laura Rosen:

Every time a newspaper like the New York Times publishes a leaked Iraq war plan, or the like, one could claim that the reporter who has been leaked such information has technically been witness to a crime (unauthorized disclosure of protected US information from their anonymous source). Does it really serve the American public interest for such leaks to dry up? Does the public have an interest in knowing? Or will US prosecutors now feel they have a right to call on reporters as witnesses to these crimes right from the get go? If you appreciate that kind of reporting, you might recognize what I believe has just gone up in smoke here. Would it be better if Seymour Hersh decided to garden?

–John Cole:

I really don’t care what the law is or how complicit some say the Times is in creating this situation, I just find it a little disturbing that the government has the power to jail people for not disclosing anonymous sources- particularly when the reporter hasn’t even written (to my knowledge- I may be wrong) a story about the issue.

*** Update ***The general consensus in the comments is that I am full of shit (no news flash there).

–Jeralyn Merritt:”So her source and Cooper’s source are not the same – since Cooper’s relented and agreed to let Cooper testify about him. How many of these Senior White House officials are there?”
–Powerline:

If you’re going to serve up a conspiracy theory–without any evidence, of course–shouldn’t the theory at least make some kind of sense?…Let’s suppose that it really was Karl Rove who told Novak that Plame was a CIA employee. Why would the administration want Fitzgerald to send reporters to jail to force them to reveal that fact? If the administration were pursuing its political interests, it would want the whole affair to die, and it would side with the reporters who want to take their “secret” to the grave. If Fitzgerald were serving the administration’s political interests, he would defer to the reporters’ assertion of privilege and conclude his investigation without identifying their sources.

–Americablog:”What does this mean for Karl Rove? That’s all I want to know.”
–skippy the bush kangaroo (who writes in lower case) has a great analysis. We love the opening lines:”mel brooks once defined “mixed emotions” as “watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new mercedes.” this is exactly how we feel at the news that judith miller is going to jail for contempt of court in the valerie plame leak investigation….we stand confused, because we stand for the bill of rights, but we can’t stand rove.”