Wednesday afternoon a federal judge told Matt Cooper of Time and Judy Miller of the New York Times that he would send them to jail in a week for contempt. Unless their attorneys miraculously succeed with desperation legal arguments, these two brave reporters will be punished for the age-old offense of refusing to name names. In this case, the purported misdeed is resisting the demands of a modern-day Inspector Javert to reveal the identities of their confidential government sources.
Matt and Judy are among my closest friends, so if you are looking for dispassionate analysis, boy, have you clicked onto the wrong website. The Supreme Court's decision Monday not to take the press-freedom case was hardly a surprise, since last-minute reprieves from the governor only arrive at the end of black-and-white movies. In this 21st century of grays, you know the situation is bleak when a potential sentence of house arrest is viewed as a good-news outcome.
For the uninitiated, let me summarize this sad-eyed saga in four action-packed sentences:
Conservative columnist Robert Novak in July 2003 outs Valerie Plame as a confidential CIA operative presumably in retribution for her husband, Joseph Wilson, publicly challenging the president's claims that Iraq had tried to purchase Niger uranium. A chorus of Democratic senators and newspaper editorial pages demand that the administration appoint a fearless, non-political prosecutor to investigate who leaked Plame's identity to Novak. After being named such a prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald publicly ignores Novak, who presumably has cut a self-serving deal. Instead, Fitzgerald targets Cooper (who wrote a followup article on the Plame flap that appeared on Time's website, but not in the magazine) and Miller (who conducted interviews, but wrote nary a word).
I will admit to a lack of journalistic objectivity, but everyone in this messy sequence of events appears to have behaved badly, except the two reporters about to be punished.
Whoever leaked Plame's CIA identity (and I would never presume to ask my friends about their sources) danced at the edge of the law in playing the Washington game of payback. Novak has certainly not earned any awards for fidelity to the First Amendment or behaving like a standup guy. Democrats exaggerated the importance of Plame's secret identity (she reportedly attended international conferences rather than operated out of the back alleys of Tehran) in an effort to embarrass the White House. Newspapers like the New York Times initially displayed an unseemly zeal to find the leaker, even though they should have anticipated the dire implications of their zeal to seal the deal on the leak investigation. Most of all, Fitzgerald's lack of prosecutorial judgment in harassing Cooper and Miller has been appalling.
Coincidentally, the Pew Research Center released a poll this week on public attitudes toward the press. Chilling are such findings as more Republicans feel that the press hurts democracy (43 percent) as believe that newspapers protect our freedoms (40 percent). As conservatives endlessly bleat about the "liberal media," they might take a few moments to remember that two reporters are facing jail because they will not reveal who in the Bush White House or the national-security empire slimed Plame.
So can we stipulate, friends, that neither Howard Dean nor Dick Durbin was the dastardly leaker? And that for all the right-wing scorn heaped on the New York Times and news magazines like Time, these publications are spending a fortune in legal fees to support their reporters in keeping mum. Somehow it is hard to square this principled stand with the cynical supposition that every member of the Mainstream Media wakes up in the morning awaiting instructions from MoveOn.org.
Nonetheless, I fail to detect a rush (or Rush!) by Bush loyalists to the barricades in honor of Cooper and Miller. It is so much ideologically easier instead for conservative websites like Lucianne to sniff at the dwindling legal protections for reporters by snarkily conjuring up “Howell Raines, Dan Rather, Newsweek, Jack Kelley, Jason Blair...we could go on and on.“ Or to follow up with a crack today about how it is "time for Judith [Miller] and Martha [Stewart] to do lunch."
I too could go on and on because my friends are standing at the cusp of a prison cell. All I can do is to wonder whether, in similar circumstances, I could come close to matching their courage. And to hope against hope that at the last minute sanity will somehow prevail.