Media Source Protection

As much as I think that the law was broken, and possibly treason committed, in the outing of Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA agent, I think it's a very bad thing that two reporters are set to go to prison for refusing to give up their sources.

As much trouble as anonymous sources can be, they're far better than the alternative. How many sources of information for our news media outlets would dry up if every anonymous source knew that they stood a chance of being outed?

Whether you like Deep Throat or not, you have to understand that in the political climate of his day, there was no official channel through which he could have gone with his information. The people on whom he had damaging information were the same people who were in charge of the investigation. Had he gone through channels, a major violation of election rules and ethics would likely have been swept under the rug and never come to light.

I think it's important for journalists to be free to promise their sources anonymity in exchange for information. Matt Cooper and Judy Miller should not be jailed for this.

Interestingly, although it would open an entirely different can of worms, I'd be a lot more comfortable with these charges if they were for reporting sensitive or top secret information. I'm still ambivalent on my feelings about that, but my gut feeling says that there are limits to what should be reportable, as long as those limits are subject to such serious scrutiny and oversight as to prevent them from being used punitively against people for reporting on scandals and administrative misbehavior.

But in this case, I believe the definition of treason includes revealing information about national undercover agents, and I think I'd be far more comfortable if Robert Novak were being charged with publishing classified information than a couple of reporters being charged with failing to give up a confidential source. Especially when of those two reporters, one merely wrote a follow up article after Mr. Novak had already dropped the bombshell, and the other didn't even publish any articles, merely conducted some interviews into the topic.

The current case should be thrown out. If someone wants to bring Mr. Novak up on charges, then I'll put some more thought into how charges of that sort might have unintended bad consequences on the fourth estate.

Copyright (c) June 29, 2005 by Liam Johnson. http://www.liamjohnson.net