Protect public interest, not journalists' self-interest
THERE'S a story about a group of university professors gathered for drinks in the rooms of a distinguished Viennese colleague.
In the course of the evening, their talk turns to what each might want, if they could have anything in the world. Their wishes take a variety of forms, until finally the choice comes round to the host, who takes a long pull on his pipe and says, "Well, if I really could have anything I wanted, anything at all, I think I would choose
Surveying the American news media and its treatment this week of events in courtrooms 3,000 miles apart, it's difficult not to conclude that our news organizations have made a similar choice when it comes to weighing the implications of their ethical shortcomings in two wrenchingly controversial legal cases.
By the time the defense rested in the perjury trial of former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the verdict on an influential group of Washington journalists was clear. Despite all the feigned martyrdom, all the dangerous and wasteful litigation, all the hand-wringing over the public's right to know that preceded their appearance in the witness box, it now is certain that NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller and former Time Magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper happily allowed themselves to be made useful idiots by a White House set on punishing a prominent critic of the Iraq war.
Miller received support from journalists across the country when she resisted a federal grand jury's demand that she testify about how she came to know that the critic, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was married to CIA agent Valerie Plame. Her paper defended her right to protect her sources in litigation all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. As it turns out, what she was concealing was not a confidential source but her own connection to a powerful and calculating manipulator out to ruin another man's reputation. It was something of a low point in contemporary journalism when Libby's lawyers subpoenaed Times Managing Editor Jill Abramson to give testimony that called Miller's honesty into question.
Russert came off looking particularly bad when, under cross-examination, it emerged that he made a public show of resisting a grand jury demand that he testify about his conversation with Libby, while secretly providing information to the FBI. Maybe that's how sophisticated Washington journalists navigate "the system," but an ordinary person with no more than the sense of right and wrong that they learned at Mother's knee would call his conduct what it is: sleazy double-dealing.
