I have been trying to work myself into high dudgeon over the predicament of those news people in Washington who have been subpoenaed to testify in the investigation of the leak, allegedly by someone in the Bush administration, that Valerie Plame, the wife of controversial former ambassador Joseph Wilson, was an undercover CIA operative.
I’ve been trying for high dudgeon, but the best I can manage is deep ambivalence.
I am a newsman, have been for more than 30 years. So I have no desire to see this work made harder or more dangerous. More to the point at this stage of my career, I work every day with journalists who do tough, exacting, sometimes dangerous work and more often than not do it very well. I have no desire to see their jobs made tougher and the hazards they face made greater.
But then I come up against what for me is the central question for a journalist in the Plame case: Was “outing” Valerie Plame–in violation of federal law and at real potential risk to her life and health and that of any of those she worked with–such an important public interest that I would have promised some White House political shark to go to jail if necessary for the privilege?
It’s not even a close call. I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue that the American public is better off for knowing of Plame’s CIA connection. (But that never was the point for the alleged leaker in the Bush administration anyway, was it?)
So here we in the journalism industry are, rushing–walking?–to the barricades to defend colleagues under siege for a bargain that was dubious at best. And we do so because we know how hard it was to win the access we enjoy to much public information.
We know that any confession of doubt about a specific case will be spun by the keepers of secrets into an argument against the need for any disclosure.
We know that it’s the rare politician who will pass up the opportunity to argue for secrecy in the interest of his little child or the security of the American people when, in fact, it’s his personal embarrassment that he’s worried about.
We know these things–and yet we also know that sometimes these causes we champion just don’t feel quite compelling.
I suspect I’m far off the reservation here. But since I’ve already got one foot in my mouth, I might as well go for both.
I’ve always been made uneasy by terms and concepts like “reporter’s privilege” and “shield law.” I think many of us who practice this trade have been seduced by a false conception of the 1st Amendment. You can hear it in the occasional observation that our business/trade/occupation is the only one explicitly protected in the Constitution. (“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom … of the press …”)
But the glory of the 1st Amendment is that it applies to every citizen and secures those fundamental rights–to freedom of religion and free exercise; speech; press; assembly and petition–for all. When I talk to community groups and others about what we in the news business do, I tell them that we work at being full-time citizens, monitoring the activities of our government agencies, public officials and other power centers and sharing what we learn with our communities.
Being able to do that for a living is the real reporter’s privilege. To the extent that we use language and employ concepts that seem to make distinctions between us in the journalistic priesthood and the rest of the citizenry, we do so at our peril.
To the extent that we argue we should be exempt from the normal obligations of citizens–to testify in a case like the Valerie Plame outing, for example–we invite the anger of our fellow citizens and encourage their contempt for the shroud in which we wrap ourselves, the 1st Amendment.
That’s not to say that there aren’t cases that would justify a promise to go to jail to protect a confidence, and would merit every dime a newspaper or other journalistic entity could spend defending that promise.
The Wen Ho Lee case, in which a judge Wednesday held five reporters in contempt of court, may be one of those. But I suspect that if we were more discriminating about such cases up front, we would find ourselves at the barricades less often afterward.
