Behind every news exposé, be it sporty (Barry Bonds and steroids), vengeful (outing CIA operative Valerie Plame), or just plain titillating (those tidbits about Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress), there is almost always a confidential source. Without confidential sources (and the reporters who love them), Watergate would simply refer to an upscale Washington hotel and C.J. would be out of a job.
News sources, as well as their close siblings, whistleblowers, understand all too well that the only difference between being a confidential source and an unmasked source is the reporter’s promise to keep their identity a secret. It’s purely a matter of trust, with no legal recourse should a reporter, sensing that someone might have to take a bullet for the team, renege on his promise and reveal his source. Or he might simply decide that the name of the source should be part of the story. In either case, the source can do nothing but suck it up.
That is, until Dan Cohen, author of the soon-to-be-published Anonymous Source, successfully sued the local dailies for outing him as the confidential source of political dirt that effectively ended the career of one high-profile politician, and tarnished the reputation of another. Cohen was the Minneapolis City Council president back in the late sixties, when Republicans actually got elected to office in Minneapolis. After briefly helping to run the Peace Corps during the Nixon administration, and making failed bids for Minneapolis mayor and county commissioner, Cohen settled into the advertising business. He also remained a loyal foot soldier for Republican candidates.
In 1982, he was carrying water for Republican gubernatorial candidate Wheelock Whitney, who, less than two weeks before the election, was trailing the ultimately victorious Rudy Perpich by twenty points. Cohen, hoping for one of those October miracles, volunteered to make public copies of police records that showed Perpich running mate Marlene Johnson had a shoplifting conviction. He took the information to the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press.
Before Cohen gave up the goods, he secured promises of anonymity from both papers. The dailies ran the story next day—with Cohen’s name and picture. Soon thereafter, the Star Tribune ran a cartoon depicting him crawling out of a garbage can, and Cohen lost his ad agency job. When he managed to get a small advertising gig with the University of Minnesota, Strib columnist Doug Grow self-righteously castigated the U of M for consorting with a bottom feeder like Cohen.
Within weeks, Cohen was virtually unemployable. He was broke, and a political pariah to boot. With his back to the wall, Cohen believed he had nothing to lose by, in his words, “suing the bastards.”
All the legal wrangling aside, wasn’t what Cohen did—leaking an opponent’s ancient shoplifting conviction days before an election—well, dirty politics? Cohen had a ready answer. “On reflection, I admit that it was mean and if I had to do it all over, I probably would not do it. However, it was not dirty. I gave the newspapers truthful information about a candidate’s criminal history. Before I ran for county commissioner I got arrested for scalping Kentucky Derby tickets. I wrote a humorous column about it so the voters knew. I got my butt handed to me in the following election, but everything was out there. I did not lie to or conceal anything from anyone. Playing dirty is when you promise to protect someone and then you rat them out.”
So many years later, why should people care about Cohen’s story? He had an answer for that as well. “The media is all over Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd’s Free Speech Protection Act of 2004, which will give reporters federal protection for refusing to reveal their confidential sources. I am not opposed to that, but they have protection. Reporters have big media on their side. Guys like me, we are totally on our own. If the media decides to burn us, as they did me, we burn—humiliated and totally abandoned to our fates.”
Dan Cohen may not be the most sympathetic figure in the world, but he does have a point. Let’s face it: People in power are usually not going to voluntarily reveal damaging information. And even though there are some courageous people who have the cojones to publicly reveal what they know—Jeffrey Wigand, who blew the whistle on Big Tobacco, and FBI agent Coleen Rowley come to mind—most of us will only do so under the cloak of anonymity. We need to know that if anyone is going to take a bullet for our truthful whispers in the shadows, it will not be us.
Leave a Reply Cancel reply