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In a major setback for proponents of the legal rights of journalists, the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday declined to hear the case of two reporters who have refused to cooperate with a grand-jury investigation.... Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and New York Times correspondent Judith Miller now face as much as 18 months in prison for civil contempt unless they comply with a lower-court order that they cooperate with a government investigation into the leak.... The Supreme Court's decision not to address the case has far-reaching implications for the rights of journalists in protecting unnamed sources from federal investigations. Reporters...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court rejected appeals Monday from two journalists who have refused to testify before a grand jury about the leak of an undercover CIA officer's identity. The cases asked the court to revisit an issue that it last dealt with more than 30 years ago - whether reporters can be jailed or fined for refusing to identify their sources. The justices' intervention had been sought by 34 states and many news groups, all arguing that confidentiality is important in news gathering. "Important information will be lost to the public if journalists cannot reliably promise anonymity to...

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court rejected appeals Monday from two journalists who have refused to testify before a grand jury about the leak of an undercover CIA officer's identity. The cases asked the court to revisit an issue that it last dealt with more than 30 years ago — whether reporters can be jailed or fined for refusing to identify their sources. The justices' intervention had been sought by 34 states and many news groups, all arguing that confidentiality is important in news gathering. "Important information will be lost to the public if journalists cannot reliably promise anonymity to sources,"...

MONTGOMERY - Congress rather than the U.S. Supreme Court should make a law protecting reporters from prosecution for refusing to identify their confidential sources, Alabama Attorney General Troy King said Tuesday. King recently declined to join attorneys general of 34 states and the District of Columbia who filed a friend-of-court brief urging the Supreme Court to recognize a qualified privilege for journalists to protect their confidential sources. The attorneys general asked the Supreme Court to hear the appeal of Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who were held in contempt of court for refusing...

Two reporters facing up to 18 months in jail for refusing to testify about their sources gained some unlikely allies yesterday. The attorneys general of 34 states and the District of Columbia filed a brief in the United States Supreme Court supporting the reporters, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine. The brief urged the court to hear the reporters' case and argued that the absence of federal protection for journalists and their sources undermined the laws of the 49 states that do offer protection.

< snip >Despite the potential problems with anonymous sources, news organizations aren't likely to stop using them anytime soon. There are too many people with essential information who are afraid to go public, sometimes out of fear of losing their jobs. (At present, TIME is defending in the courts the refusal of its correspondent Matthew Cooper to disclose one of his sources to a federal grand jury.) But many in the media, amid periodic waves of criticism, are re-examining how often to use unnamed sources.

Two reporters facing up to 18 months in jail for refusing to testify about their sources lost another round in the courts today. The reporters, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, now have only one appeal left, to the United States Supreme Court.

"The nation's largest news organizations and journalism groups" filed a brief in federal court Wednesday arguing that "a federal court should first determine whether a crime has been committed in the disclosure of an undercover CIA operative's name before prosecutors are allowed to continue seeking testimony from journalists about their confidential sources," the Washington Post reports: The 40-page brief, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, argues that there is "ample evidence . . . to doubt that a crime has been committed" in the case, which centers on the question of whether Bush...

When unnamed Bush administration officials gave the name of CIA official Valerie Plame to syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak 16 months ago, many in the news media decried what they saw as the possibly illegal "outing" of a secret operative in reprisal for criticism of the administration by her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. What they did not foresee was that the investigation of this alleged crime would end up targeting the press. Two reporters, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Judith Miller of the New York Times -- neither of whom had anything to do with the...

A Victory for Press Freedom n a welcome ruling for this newspaper, and the larger cause of robust journalism and government accountability, a federal judge in New York has barred a federal prosecutor's ill-conceived effort to get the phone records of two Times reporters from the fall of 2001 in order to discover the identity of their confidential sources. To justify this intrusive fishing expedition, which could reveal hundreds of communications with confidential sources, the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago, had argued that the records were needed for a grand jury's investigation of government misconduct in...

Lawmakers: Writer May Have CIA Leak Info Thursday, February 24, 2005 WASHINGTON — Two lawmakers have sent a letter to the U.S. attorney saying a White House reporter who recently resigned following questions about his identity and background may have information vital to the investigation into who leaked a CIA operative's name to the press. Reps. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., and John Conyers, D-Mich., the ranking Democrats on the House Rules Committee and House Judiciary Committee, respectively, wrote a letter to Patrick Fitzgerald (search), the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, saying the Chicago attorney's office may need to...

WASHINGTON -- The media -- its privileges, practices, biases, and battles with the government -- were in the news last week. [ snip ] Neither Judith Miller of The New York Times nor Matthew Cooper of Time magazine wrote the offending story, but Miller, it's thought, spoke to an official who is a target of the investigation....they seem likely to be jailed for contempt. Last week, a court ruled they had no First Amendment right to shield information from a criminal inquiry.[ snip ] ...this might give pause to people who have contended that there is no meaningful difference between...

You might have seen Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper on TV. They are reporters for The New York Times and Time magazine, respectively. They give every impression of being intelligent, professional and decent people, and they might well be going to prison for 18 months. That's a tragedy for them, but for the rest of us it's an object lesson in media inanity. Miller and Cooper, who are refusing to reveal their sources in a federal investigation, have hit the talk-show circuit as anguished defenders of the First Amendment and of the media's watchdog role. They are quite sincere about...

WASHINGTON -- A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a ruling against two reporters who could go to jail for refusing to divulge their sources to investigators probing the leak of an undercover CIA officer's name to the media. The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with prosecutors in their attempt to compel Time magazine's Matthew Cooper and The New York Times' Judith Miller to testify before a federal grand jury about their confidential sources. "We agree with the District Court that there is no First Amendment privilege protecting the information...

In 41 years as a pundit, Robert D. Novak has rarely shied from controversy. As a syndicated columnist and fixture on cable-news shoutfests, Mr. Novak has opined from the right about some of the biggest stories of his time. He has been a stout cold warrior, a critic of Israeli policies and a passionate defender of military veterans who criticized Senator John Kerry's Vietnam War record. But now Mr. Novak, 73, finds himself a central figure in perhaps the gravest confrontation between the government and the press in a generation, and he has been uncharacteristically circumspect. With a federal judge...

As many as 100 FBI agents, federal prosecutors and other department employees are likely to be asked—possibly as early as the next few weeks—to sign broadly worded statements waiving any confidentiality agreements they had with journalists about the anthrax case, Justice officials tell NEWSWEEK. The waiver statement was recently ordered by a federal judge at the urging of lawyers for bioterrorism expert Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, who has filed a lawsuit alleging that government officials leaked damaging personal information about him in an effort to connect him with the anthrax attacks.

In an Oct. 10 editorial titled "The Promise of the First Amendment," the publisher and chief executive of the New York Times opined that for a federal judge to imprison their reporter Judith Miller for contempt of court violates the press freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment. This argument misstates existing law and misunderstands the issues at stake.... The Times argues that "the press cannot perform its intended role if its sources of information -- particularly information about the government -- are cut off." Hence, Ms. Miller has a First Amendment right to refuse to respond to the subpoena. This...

A prosecutor's investigation into an apparent attempt by the Bush administration to punish a political opponent by revealing classified information has veered terribly off course. It threatens grievous harm to freedom of the press and the vital protection it provides against government misconduct. The reality of the threat was driven home, quite personally for us, last week, when a federal judge in Washington sentenced a Times reporter, Judith Miller, to up to 18 months in prison for refusing to testify before a grand jury. The panel is looking into who gave Robert Novak the name of a covert Central Intelligence...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 15 - President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, testified on Friday to a federal grand jury investigating whether it was anyone at the White House who had illegally disclosed the name of a C.I.A. undercover officer to a newspaper columnist, a lawyer for Mr. Rove said. "He answered fully and truthfully every one of their questions," the lawyer, Robert Luskin, said. Mr. Luskin added that Mr. Rove, who testified for more than two hours, did not seek to avoid answering any question on legal grounds. A spokesman for the White House, Scott McClellan, said the testimony demonstrated...