Think Again: The World Turned Upside Down: Reporting 2004

[TacticalPeek]

Think Again: The World Turned Upside Down: Reporting 2004

by Eric Alterman with Paul McLeary
December 23, 2004

It will likely stand as one of the great ironies of 2004 that after all of the scandals, lies, cover-ups, investigations, Congressional inquiries, illegal detentions and general mayhem that has marked this year, the only people being threatened with jail time in connection with the Bush administration's malfeasance are journalists.

This topsy-turvy result derives from the still unexplained direction taken in the official investigation into just who leaked CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to the press back in July, 2003. While the reporter who actually blew her cover was unarguably Robert Novak, who refuses to discuss the matter in public, a three-judge federal appellate panel in Washington is currently considering whether or not to uphold sentences of up to 18 months in prison for Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine. Their crime? The refusal to disclose the anonymous sources they used in reporting their respective stories; stories they did not even write.

Miller and Cooper are not alone. On December 9th, Jim Taricani, a television reporter in Providence, R.I., was sentenced to six months of house arrest (the judge made a show of telling him only poor health saved him from prison) for refusing to reveal the anonymous source who gave him an F.B.I. videotape of a local official accepting a bribe. According to an AP report of the sentencing, the presiding judge scolded journalists generally for "thinking they have exclusive, unreviewable authority to employ confidential sources."

Journalists were not only faced with jail time simply for doing their jobs this past year; their jobs grew increasingly perilous. By December 20th, as the Committee to Protect Journalists reported, (http://www.cpj.org/killed/killed04.html) 55 journalists had been killed worldwide, more than the 51 who died in 1995, when journalists were specifically targeted during Algeria's civil war. Of the 55 killed, close to half – 23 – died in Iraq.


more
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=275638

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"Their crime? The refusal to disclose the anonymous sources..." - this assumes facts not in evidence, as they say, IIRC.

[tsuki]

1. The real irony is that Kovak has stated publicly that reporters

should disclose the names of their confidential informants, but has not been asked who his was.

[Kolesar]

3. Novak? ... eom

[txaslftist]

2. So freedom of the press means....

Freedom to go to jail?