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Jewish World Review Oct. 24, 2005 / 21 Tishrei, 5766 A reporter's conflict: Hero or stooge? By Clarence Page
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Conservative critics usually can't stop jabbering on about the "liberal media." Yet the pantheon of punditry on the Right has been oddly mute about the amazing service that the New York Times' Judith Miller has performed for the Bush administration's policy of regime change in Iraq.
Boosters of Team Bush should give Miller a medal.
She recently spent 85 days in a federal prison for refusing to identify a confidential source.
Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said her testify was crucial to his investigation of the Bush administration leak that outed undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of the Bush White House.
Although Miller's lawyers had argued that her incarceration would be futile, since she was not about to give up her source, she eventually cut a deal after she received a personal waiver from a confidential source, who turned out to be I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to our nation's Vice President Dick Cheney's.
All of this and more was recounted by the Times in two Sunday articles that leave a lot of unanswered questions. Among them: Is Miller a hero for press freedom or a shill for White House dirty tricksters?
I don't know Miller's personal politics and that is how it should be. She's a reporter. Unlike us scriveners on the opinion side of newspapering, she wouldn't be doing her job if her personal biases showed up in her writing.
But, by her own account, she was willing not only to help Libby shovel a little dirt on Wilson but also to cooperate in an effort to bury the tracks which led back to the upper levels of the Bush administration.
Miller was honored Tuesday with a First Amendment Award at the national conference of the Society of Professional Journalists in Las Vegas. She defended her decision to go to jail to protect a source and spoke up for a federal shield law so that others won't face similar sanctions.
But other journalists have characterized Miller as a possible co-conspirator with the Bush administration in the attempt to discredit Wilson, who openly questioned the intelligence used to justify the Iraq invasion.
As Democratic operative Jim Carville said in August, "It's going to be very interesting to see whether (Miller's) problem is a First Amendment (problem) — i.e., I want to protect a source — or a Fifth Amendment (problem) — I was out spreading this stuff, too."
Now, her own account in Sunday's Times describes a conversation on July 8, 2003, with Libby in which he asks to be identified only as a "former Hill staffer." Miller had agreed earlier to refer to Libby as a "senior administration official," but agreed to Libby's request. Why? Because "Libby did not want the White House to be seen as attacking Mr. Wilson," she assumed. Yet, she went along with the subterfuge. It wasn't a lie, she rationalizes, since Libby had once worked on Capitol Hill. But what about the ethical question of helping the Bush administration hide its hand in the anti-Wilson smear?
If ever there was a point where Miller crossed the line from reporting on Team Bush to being its accomplice, in my humble view, this was it.
And since the Times has backed up Miller's reporting and her initial refusal to testify, their good name rides with Miller's reporting.
"Ultimately, we protect sources so people will come forth — so people will know," Miller told the SPJ, in opposing a "fishing expedition" into her sources. "It is the freedom of people to talk to the press without getting in trouble, it is that right that's under assault today."
She's right, but she has done about as much to undermine that right as to help protect it. By cutting a deal to end her jail term early, she encouraged other prosecutors to use reporters to do their work for them, despite the Supreme Court ruling in the early 1970s that prosecutors should turn to journalists only as a last resort.
And what kind of source was she protecting? Libby does not appear to be a whistleblower trying to expose internal waste, fraud, abuse or corruption. If anything, the administration was exercising a tactic of smearing its critics in order to suppress information that ran counter to its arguments for war.
What separates this episode of political hardball from the usual political fun and games is the law that appears to have been broken, the outing of a CIA agent and a compromise of national security.
More important, is the ultimate issue at stake here, the ability of Americans to be properly informed before their nation goes to war.
Journalists make deals with sources all the time. Reporter Bob Woodward and his editors knew that his "Deep Throat" had vested interests in revealing the Watergate scandal to the Washington Post. But the Post editors also knew that the public and history would judge whether the story was worth it.
History similarly will judge Miller and the Times and whether the story they covered was worth the role they played in it.
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Comment on Clarence Page's column by clicking here. © 2005, TMS |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
