The prosecutor chided their pleas for home confinement, saying a "forced vacation at a comfortable home is not a compelling form of coercion." As an alternative, the journalists had sought confinement at a federal prison camp -- a proposal Fitzgerald also opposed.
Time spokeswoman Dawn Bridges declined to comment.
A spokeswoman for the New York Times, Catherine Mathis, said, "We intend to respond to the special counsel's views in court."
In court papers, Fitzgerald said that by promising confidentiality to sources, Cooper was claiming a power for journalists to "honor a commitment that no member of the executive branch can make ... even the attorney general of the United States." He said journalists should not receive special treatment when they violated court orders.
Besides citing Time's cooperation, Cooper, who has a 6-year-old son, had argued that incarceration would unduly punish his family.
Miller separately argued that confinement in her case was futile because she had no intention of revealing her sources, and said she was upholding long-standing traditions of a free press.
Countering that argument, Fitzgerald cited journalists, 1st Amendment scholars and others who disagreed "with the position Miller is taking at the behest of the New York Times." Among those he cited was the top editor of Time Inc., Norman Pearlstine, who made the decision to turn over the information about the sources Cooper used.
"Pearlstine is by no means alone among editors who adhere to the unremarkable proposition that the law must be obeyed by all," Fitzgerald wrote.
The prosecutor highlighted an article in the March-April issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, which said that many reporters and press advocates were chagrined that the case of CIA Agent Valerie Plame had become a test of journalists' ability to maintain confidential sources. The magazine said that many journalists believed that the reporters' sources, in exposing and endangering a covert operative, had committed an act that was not worth protecting.
Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for the New York Times who spent time embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq, included testimonials from military officers familiar with her work in the papers she filed Friday in a plea to avoid jail. She also cited her health concerns, and those of her husband, 76.
