Punishing the Press [NY TIMES

On Dec. 9, a television reporter in Providence, R.I., Jim Taricani, was sentenced to six months of house arrest for refusing to reveal who gave him an F.B.I. videotape showing a local official taking a bribe. Mr. Taricani did nothing illegal. Yet the Rhode Island federal judge who sentenced him pointedly said that only health problems spared him a prison term.

The worry now is that a three-judge federal appellate panel in Washington will take an equally cramped view of reporters' rights and affirm sentences of up to 18 months in prison that a lower court imposed in October on Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine. At issue is the pair's principled refusal to disclose their sources in connection with the investigation that the United States attorney and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is leading into the leaking of the name of a covert C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame, to the columnist Robert Novak.

Among the strange wrinkles in this case is that Mr. Novak, who first published Ms. Plame's name, seems to be in no jeopardy, while Mr. Cooper faces jail time stemming from an article he wrote exposing the administration's seamy motive of retaliating against Ms. Plame's husband for criticizing Iraq policy. Stranger still is Mr. Fitzgerald's decision to entangle Ms. Miller, since she never wrote a single article about the Plame controversy.

The appellate panel expressed palpable hostility to the notion that the First Amendment provides any protection for journalists subpoenaed to reveal their confidential sources to a grand jury. We hope that this is a case where the tenor of an oral argument does not foretell the content of a court's ruling. That same appellate hearing also explored another legal avenue the court could take to stop the two journalists from becoming the only people punished for the Bush administration's abuse of power in leaking the name of a covert C.I.A. operative.

In a series of questions, one of the three judges, David Tatel, sketched a promising alternative that would accord some legal protection in the grand jury setting, on grounds other than the First Amendment, involving a broad balancing of the equities. Ample basis for such a resolution can be found in a 1996 Supreme Court case that recognized legal protection of patients' statements to their psychotherapists. It can also be found in the reality that 49 states and the District of Columbia now offer journalists some degree of protection - a near consensus that easily supports at least a qualified common law privilege protecting a reporter's vital work.

Even without what we continue to believe are strong First Amendment claims, it would take no great legal stretch for Judge Tatel and his colleagues to overturn the lower court ruling regarding Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper. All it would require is a healthy regard for robust journalism, government accountability and an informed citizenry.

When we get another Bill Clinton in office things will look different.

Then only reason judges are going after this is that they are hoping for a Bush/Plame scandal.

Receiving stolen property is a felony in every state in the Union, unless I am very much mistaken. This isn't about ''sources'', it's about pure criminal conduct, with the sidebar of deliberate misapplication of the very text of the 1st Amendment in order to create yet another 'victim' class of criminal.

"When we get another Bill Clinton in office things will look different."

Rubbish. The news media still won't tell us who hired Craig Livingstone. Where were the Rose Law Firm billing records, and why did they turn up in the White House only *after* the special prosecutor's time had expired?

More recently, what is the *content* of the leaked Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee memos? Did Sandy Berger have a camera-phone when he was stealing classified documents just prior to our November election? Why did the press keep silent about Bernie Kerik's scandals until *after* he was nominated for a Bush cabinet position (what, that behavior only bothered them later), and who leaked it?!

So no, the partisan press deserves no special legal rights...and no, things won't be different with the Old Media.

Random Freepers (and yes, DU'ers too) posting messages have no less of a right to be called 'journalists' than the people graduating from Columbia J-school. NYT: the internet has destroyed the whole concept of 'journalism' as you knew it. Get with the program.

He did. He did not come right out and say who told him what and when, but he gave them enough info that they did not need more. They interviewed the guys he talked to, and those guys don't have any privilege to hide behind.

What they are trying to do now with these other guys is to poke holes in the story they've already got.

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