Jordan Green is a graduate student at Columbia University and an associate researcher for the Durham, N.C.-based Institute for Southern Studies. His work has been published in Color- Lines, CounterPunch, and the Nation, among other publications.
Posted on 07/12/2005 11:36:42 AM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
The jailing of New York Times reporter Judith Miller on July 6 for refusing to reveal anonymous sources to a Bush administration special prosecutor is the latest ricochet of the political conniving and bullying that thrust the country into a war and a costly occupation in Iraq.
A federal appeals court has ruled that Miller and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper are obligated to testify to a grand jury about conversations they had with anonymous sources. Shielding the confidentiality of journalistic sources is a time-honored practice, held in the same regard — at least until now — as confidentiality between psychiatrists and patients, lawyers and clients, and priests and confessors. More so than other professions, the privileged relationship between journalist and source is critical to the functioning of democracy in that it allows whistleblowers to come forward and expose government wrongdoing without fear of retaliation.
Miller is in jail because the Supreme Court declined to take the case and thus clarify once and for all what protections journalists and their confidential sources should enjoy. Cooper decided to testify just before surrendering to the authorities after disclosing that his source — reputed in several media reports to be White House Senior Advisor Karl Rove — gave him permission to disclose his identity.
We are headed down a dangerous road now, with an administration determined to humiliate the press in its traditional role as a check on governmental abuse, a Supreme Court that can’t be bothered with protection of the First Amendment and a public that seems more preoccupied with reality TV than what government does in its name.
To appreciate the absurdity of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s hounding of Miller and Cooper, it’s instructive to look back at how the two became ensnared in this net in the first place. The prosecution, in fact, was launched after conservative columnist Robert Novak, whose punditry tends to lean favorably towards the administration, wrote a column exposing Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. Novak’s column appeared shortly after Plame’s husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, published an opinion piece critical of Bush’s Iraq policy. Whoever outted Plame to Novak likely broke the law, which makes it a crime to expose a CIA agent, thus endangering her life and ending her career as a spy.
Novak has refused to discuss the Justice federal investigation, and is widely believed to be cooperating with the prosecution. It is difficult to believe the federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, and senior Bush administration officials don’t already know the identity of the White House staffer who leaked Plame’s identity to Novak.
It is the height of absurdity that Novak, who colluded in endangering Plame’s life, is quietly riding out the storm of controversy while a reporter who may have talked to sources about Plame’s identity but didn’t write a story about it, is sitting behind bars.
Senior NPR News analyst Daniel Schorr, who covered the Watergate scandal as a correspondent for CBS News, said it best: “Today’s decision to jail Judith Miller… can be regarded as a frontal attack on the press.”
"the privileged relationship between journalist and source is critical to the functioning of democracy in that it allows whistleblowers to come forward and expose government wrongdoing without fear of retaliation."
Book'em Dano
Makes you wonder who it is Miller is protecting - for sure, it is not Rove
"Yes Weekly" LOL. Don't give this socialist rag any free FReeper PR, OK?
It's the "height of absurdity" that the author of this is a puffed-up little greenhorn mouthbreather with a bona-fid liberal deee-gree from a second tier state school. Hoo-doggies, he can plumb cipher!!!
Because two supreme court seats were not coming up, then. This has been timed to weaken the administration at a key point in its second term.
Bologna. A reporter can print anything he likes and be shielded by the 1st Amenment. There is absolutely nothing I can find in the constitution or elsewhere that allows him to break the law with impunity because he was trying to get a story.
Some state have journalist shield laws, but the feds don't.
The amazing thing is that all this crying is over requiring the journalists to obey the laws the rest of us must obey or pay the price.
She's protecting her career. If she talks, nobody will ever trust her again.
Jordan Green is a graduate student at Columbia University and an associate researcher for the Durham, N.C.-based Institute for Southern Studies. His work has been published in Color- Lines, CounterPunch, and the Nation, among other publications.
Rush was talking about this: his take is that the identity of the source would embarrass the NYT/liberals.
There.
I fixed it.
Yeah, I heard that, but what could be more embarrassing than no source?
What's the difference?
The only thing that could immenently endanger her life is a spoiled Lobster Thermidor.
This yellow journalism story to get Rove is going to fall appart and fall appart HARD.
This time it seems the NYT is going to take down ALL the media that is going in lockstep to "get rove". Sadly, this morning it seemed to include FNC.
We have more than enough posts here on FR which show that Wilson's wife's employment by the CIA was an open and know fact. There was NOTHING secret about it as long as you were part fo the DC party circuit.
I think the real issue is that Wilson resented being exposed as a minor flunky. I bet it is just as valid that Wilson is the source.
If Rove was the source, the reporterette would have been out of jail. Rove is not the source that is why she is in jail.
Either that .. or the NYT doesn't want to reveal who the source is.
The difference is that the NYT has already fired a bunch of its reporters for making up stories. Judith Miller is one of their top reporters. If Judith Miller gets Jayson Blaired, it's a long jump for the NYT's management from the top floor of the NYT building.
In summary, they're not protecting anyone, but they want to keep the cloud hanging over the Bush administration and keep hammering them on rumor, innuendo and speculation. All of that would go away if their part of the story is testified to under oath.
"The only thing that could immenently endanger her life is a spoiled Lobster Thermidor."
Or, during a photo shoot, getting that Hermes scarf tangled in the wire spokes of their Jag, a la Jane Mansfield, maybe?
...that was Isadora Duncan.
"In summary, they're not protecting anyone"
Actually, I think someone IS being protected, and that someone is Valerie Plame. It's all a diversion to keep attention focused away from her actions in sending her own husband on what can only be termed a classic disinformatzia mission, which was politically motivated from the get-go.
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