There’s been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth among the people who write about media concerning the case of NY Times reporter Judith Miller and Time Magazine reporter Matt Cooper, who are facing prison time for doing what they think of as their jobs.
In case you haven’t been paying attention to such things, Miller and Cooper are in trouble with a federal judge for their refusal to name confidential sources to a grand jury investigating who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent to Bush Administration shill Robert Novak after Plame’s husband Joseph Wilson contraticted the President’s assertion Iraq was buying uranium from Niger. (You can also read Novak’s explanation of how and why he did it here.)
Now a lot of us have been wondering why Novak isn’t under threat of jail, because he’s the one who certainly knows who told him about Plame, when Miller, who wrote not one word for publication about the matter, and Cooper, who wrote about the investigation into the leak, are.
Miller and Cooper are asserting their First Amendment right to keep sources confidential, but that ain’t flying with either the judge who is threatening them, or the three judge panel of the D.C. Appeals Court who affirmed his decision. Unless they can get the full Appeals Court, or the Supreme Court (which has already issued a ruling that doesn’t exactly support their position) to hear the case, it looks like the reporters are headed for the hoosegow.
Now, these reporters make a good argument that reporters can’t do their jobs if, in effect, the government uses them as extentions of their own police investigative powers. After all, who in government or industry is ever going to blow a whistle if they know the government can force reporters to give them up?
Today in Slate, Jack Shafer, (the most thoughtful media writer around for our money) has a different take. He suggests Cooper and Miller get a better lawyer, specifically the guy who wrote the law being used to pummel them.
I’ll leave it to you to consider what Shafer hopes will be a better legal strategy to keep Miller and Cooper out of jail, and whether or not, in this case, it’s better to plead it out and let the First Amendment live to fight another day.
Of course, this could also be resoved by a Congress who has the best interests of the nation at heart. Such a Congress would extend its previously passed protections for whistle blowers to those who provide the loud whistle in the first place–the press.
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