By Sydney H. Schanberg
The Village Voice (New York, N.Y.)
Oct. 07, 2005
Excerpt:
The American press has been under siege in recent years —
mostly from the right, which accuses journalists of being
overwhelmingly liberal and determinedly hostile to the Bush
administration. More and more court decisions have reversed
journalists’ traditional privileges — such as protection, under the
freedom-of-the-press language of the First Amendment, from having to
testify or turn over notes, except in extraordinary cases.Miller cited those privileges in her refusal to cooperate with the
prosecutor. She says she did it to protect the confidentiality of her
sources. Virtually everyone in the journalism world believes in the
need for confidentiality to enable whistleblower sources to come
forward anonymously and expose wrongdoing — without fear of
retaliation. But many have expressed doubts about Miller’s reporting
methods and her relationships with her sources.One of the warts on this case — and therefore on Novak’s and Miller’s
silence — is the fact that the sources this time, as is frequently the
case with high-placed Washington leakers, were not civic-minded
whistleblowers. They were major administration wheeler-dealers trying
to smear Wilson, a former U.S. diplomat with service in Africa, who had
challenged the Bush claim that the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq had
gone to Africa seeking to purchase uranium yellowcake, needed for
nuclear weapons. This was a key part of the weapons-of-mass-destruction
rationale that Bush employed to lead the country into war against Iraq
in 2003. Nearly all the Bush arguments for war turned out to be false,
hyped, or hollow. The claim about the yellowcake, for instance, was
based on forged documents.[…]
We reporters are always insisting on full disclosure and transparency
from the people and institutions we write about. Now, with the press
under scrutiny and in some quarters under attack, it has become
necessary for reporters to do their own disclosing.
