Attorney / Client confidentiality is protected under your Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination.
Doctor / Patient confidentiality is protected under your Fourth Amendment right to privacy.
But ... nowhere in the Bill of Rights or the Constitution is there anything protecting the so called Reporter / Source confidentiality.
Big Media would like you to believe it's in the First Amendment (when it suits them). It's not. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press, but that freedom does not mean a freedom from accountability. The press is accountable to the truth, and must remain accountable to the truth. The fiction of Reporter / Source confidentiality (especially in cases where criminal behavior is involved or alleged) is just a sleazy attempt to free reporters from their accountability to the truth. If they don't have to reveal their sources, they could make up any "source" they want, and pass off any fiction they desire.
And if that argument based on the principles of truth and honesty isn't enough, the fiction of Reporter / Source confidentiality directly violates your Sixth Amendment right to be confronted with the witnesses against you and to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in your favor. Of course, Big Media has worked long and hard to disassemble the Bill of Rights, and only believes they are obligated to comply with the parts of the First Amendment they enjoy, and only then while it suits them. We need to disabuse them of this agenda, and soon. Jailing Miller is a good start.
Karl rove has a Sixth Amendment right to have Judith Miller compelled to act as a witness in his favor. He has a right to have her compelled to name her source. Obviously, the compulsion of prison time is insufficient. The court should have levied an exponentially increasing fine on both her and her media masters. Corporations are not punished by the temporary imprisonment of their lackeys. They are only compelled through their profit margin.
She's in jail, not prison. I wonder this: if at the end of her 120 days in jail for civil contempt, she is brought before the Grand Jury again, and asked the same questions, and she refuses to answer, would the judge charge her with criminal contempt, as he has said, and then order her to serve that 180 days in PRISON?
You see, prison is a whole 'nuther world from jail. I've visited both a number of times on assignments and they are day and night different. Miller might think she can handle jail for a 180 day sentence, but if they put her in prison, maybe she'll see things differently.