Protecting Confidential Sources

15 July 2005 |permalink | email article

A national debate has erupted within the Scribbling Class over the right of journalists to protect their confidential sources. Some snapshots:

New York Times columnist Frank Rich framed the issue last Sunday in noting that “it’s hard to be dismissive now that my colleague Judy Miller has been taken away in shackles for refusing to name a source for a story she never wrote.” He added:

“No reporter went to jail during Watergate. No news organization buckled like Time. No one instigated a war on phony premises. This is worse than Watergate.”

The same day, Michael Kinsley, editorial and opinion editor of The Los Angeles Times, criticized a previous editorial in The New York Times asserting that this is not a matter of being “above the law.” It is a matter of “civil disobedience.” He suggested that the “courts have spoken in the Plame case.”

Kinsley admitted that his theory that reporters aren’t above the law is a contentious topic among journalists. “Most of my colleagues at The Los Angeles Times, including the editor himself, disagree with what I say here.”

Switch reels to a riveting e-mail exchange, as posted by Jim Romensko Tuesday on the Poynter Institute Online Forum , between LAT’s Nick Goldberg and NYT’s Bill Keller.

Goldberg, editor of the op-ed page, notes previous columns by Kinsley opposing Miller’s right to protect her sources and stating “that a reporters’ right to protect his or her sources is not necessarily more important than the government’s right to get the information it needs.”

Goldberg makes executive editor Keller a Miller-Kinsley debate proposal:

“This is a bit of a long shot, but I thought that perhaps Judy Miller would like to write some kind of rejoinder (especially now that Kinsley’s columns and editorial, as I understand it, are being used by the prosecutor to help make his case). Is such a thing possible? Is there any way to contact her and ask if she’s interested?

Keller’s reply:

“Sadly, Judy is not on a fellowship at some writers’ colony. She is in JAIL. She is sleeping on a foam mattress on the floor, and her communications are, shall we say, constrained.

“I have to tell you that Mike’s contrarian intellectualizing on the subject of reporters and the law was more amusing when it was all hypothetical. Back then it was just punditry. But that was before Norm Pearlstine embraced acquiescence as corporate policy, and before Judy Miller braved the real-world discomforts of the moral high ground. Of course this is an important issue, and clever minds should wrestle with it. But at the moment Kinsley and Pearlstine seem perversely remote from the world where actual reporters work.”

N.B. Frank Rich correctly put the question, “Should a journalist protect a sleazy, possibly even criminal, source? Yes, sometimes, if the public is to get news of wrongdoing.”

545