SAN FRANCISCO — At a private reception at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on April 30, 2005, President Bush praised two newspaper reporters for their award-winning stories on steroid use in professional sports.
"You've done a service," Bush twice told Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada of the San Francisco Chronicle.
But today the two journalists, in a standoff with the Bush administration, face longer terms in prison than the combined sentences of all the defendants convicted in the steroid scandal they helped expose.
In September, a judge sentenced Williams, 56, and Fainaru-Wada, 41, to up to 18 months in prison for refusing to tell the U.S. Justice Department who leaked grand jury transcripts implicating baseball stars -- including Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi -- in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, or BALCO, steroid ring. They are free pending an appeal hearing, set for Feb. 12.
Impasses between journalists and prosecutors seeking to unmask their sources are increasingly common, familiar to anyone who followed the jailing of former New York Times reporter Judith Miller for refusing to reveal who disclosed the identity of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame.
But the BALCO case -- although not fraught with the political overtones of the Miller case -- has broader implications for the media.
Not only journalists, but two former Justice Department officials, have suggested that prosecutors are overreaching. One of those officials said the subpoenas, if upheld in court, would greatly broaden the government's ability to stifle investigative reporting.
"This is very disturbing," said Mark Corallo, who was director of public affairs for the Justice Department under former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and involved in reviewing requests for media subpoenas.
"There is no national security issue here. There is no public safety issue. If they can make this the standard, then confidential-source reporting as you know it is done, over."
The BALCO prosecutors, Brian Hershman and Michael Raphael, argue that letting people get away with violating a federal judge's order -- in this case, an order not to release grand jury material -- could undermine justice.
The leak, on balance, "served only to titillate and hold up to public ridicule those athletes who admitted using steroids before the grand jury; witnesses who testified under the belief that their grand jury testimony would be 'secret,' " the prosecutors argued in court filings.
