Jailing Journalists: Federal shield needed

Thursday, July 7, 2005

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

There is no federal law that shields Judith Miller from being sent to jail for refusing to disclose the identity of her confidential sources. But there should be.

While such laws do, to one extent or another, offer protection in many states, the case involving Miller, a reporter for The New York Times, and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper is a federal one. Each has been ordered to tell a federal grand jury the name of the person who apparently violated federal law by disclosing to them that Valerie Plame was a covert CIA operative. By refusing, they faced the prospect of going to jail on contempt charges.

But in a last-minute turnaround yesterday, Cooper told U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan that his source had freed him from his promise of anonymity.

Hogan ordered Miller, who never actually wrote a story about Plame, to jail, saying, "The court has to take some action to attempt to get her to comply. I cannot find that Ms. Miller has shown that is a realistic possibility, at least until she has been confined."

Another strange twist in this story is that the journalist who first "outed" Plame in his column, conservative commentator Robert Novak, apparently faces no jail time, no contempt charge, none of the pressure Hogan and federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald have placed on Cooper and Miller. Does Novak enjoy his own personal shield for being a White House toady?

After all, the presumed motive of the "two senior (Bush) administration officials" who exposed Plame to Novak and other journalists was to punish her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who blew the whistle on President Bush's Niger-sold-uranium-to-Iraq part of the justification for going to war.

A federal shield law bill is pending in Congress. Miller's plight should spark renewed interest in and swift passage of the bill.

No privilege need be absolute. But there ought to be a balance on the fulcrum of federal legislation; a shield law is better than one court case after another.


Can government or corporate corruption be exposed without the use of anonymous sources?
33.2% Yes.	65.0% No.
1.8% Don't care.
Total Votes: 217