Breeding lapdogs

I’ve got a strategist named Rove and a press corps I call Rover

Judith Miller of the NY Times reports today to a judge for sentencing for her refusal to reveal her source in the Plame matter. There are some who think she should be going to jail for her complete bullshit reporting on the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. (I love Jack Shafer.)

But, I still can’t get behind the government essentially using reporters to do their investigative work for them. After all, prosecutors have the subpoena and the threat of jail they can use on suspects. And, as we saw in the Martha Stewart case, they can even put people in prison who didn’t actually commit a crime, but only lied to investigators.

So, why jail reporters? A lot of us think it’s because it’s a hell of a lot easier than jailing the guys at the White House who actually did the leaking…and don’t think the prosecutor doesn’t know who it was. He has information from the slimy Robert Novak–otherwise he’d be in jail, too, right?–and he now has Matt Cooper’s notes from the spineless Norman Pearlstine at Time. (BTW, “Pearlstine” will henceforth be the default answer to the question, “Why should we not entrust the First Amendment to publicly held corporations?”)

But, the real answer is that reporters, when they’re doing it right–and Miller (in this case) and Cooper were doing it right–are a danger to government run amok. Let’s look at some of the stories in my lifetime that relied on reporters being able to protect their sources: Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, My Lai, the Downing Street Memo–and those are just some of the big ones.

Yup, a government who can’t control the press, either through subterfuge, payments, or intimidation can’t survive for long.

Woof.