What more must the office of the vice president of the United States do to cure journalists of their dangerous addiction?
Everyone knows that curiosity is at the core of every journalist’s psyche. Without that, they — and their readers — would learn very little.
Vice President Dick Cheney, though, clearly has seen how destructive that seemingly benign characteristic can be when allowed to grow into something that can’t be controlled. And, contrary to his image of having a testy relationship with the press, he seems genuinely committed to helping journalists overcome their problem.
I think they call it “tough love.”
The trial of Cheney’s former aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, provides an initial glimpse into the vice president’s innovative therapy for reporters who have fallen prey to their desire for information.
Journalists have a long history of accepting evidence of wrongdoing, particularly in public office, from people they agree not to identify. They do that to ensure that oftentimes-vulnerable people — largely in government — will feel free to come forward, without fear of reprisal, with information that is in the public’s interest. That’s good and necessary.
Everyone knows that the journalist’s creed calls for protecting the source’s identity when anonymity is promised, even if it means going to jail — which many have done.
In the Libby case, however, the information being conveyed — that the wife of a Bush administration critic was a Central Intelligence Agency operative — didn’t benefit the public so much as it tarnished the critic.
Still, curious journalists, one after another, agreed to protect the identity of the source of that politically charged information — which Libby says Cheney authorized him to provide.
It’s clear to me that Cheney was trying to show journalists — one of whom went to jail for 85 days to protect Libby’s identity — how out of control their addiction to information had become.
Now the vice president has taken it a step further, and we can only hope that his efforts are not in vain.
For decades, high-ranking federal-government officials in anonymity-obsessed Washington, D.C., have agreed to speak with reporters on the condition that they be identified only as a “senior administration official” — or SAO, in journo-jargon.
I’ll let you figure out whom those SAOs’ information serves — you or them.
Still, information-addicted reporters have gone along with the gag, spewing out what they have been told and protecting the identities of the public servants doing the spewing.
Apparently concerned about such hypocrisy, the vice president valiantly decided to blow the whistle on that practice.
On a flight last week that included stops in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Oman, where Cheney conferred with leaders in the region, seven journalists finally were given a chance to talk with someone they were allowed to identify only as a “senior administration official.”
That “official” was quoted by various news organizations as saying the following: “Let me just make one editorial comment here. I’ve seen some press reporting that says, ‘Cheney went in to beat up on them, threaten them.’ That’s not the way I work. I don’t know who would write that, or maybe someone gets it from a source who doesn’t know what I’m doing, or isn’t involved in it. But the idea that I’d go in and threaten someone is an invalid misreading of the way I do business.”
We, of course, have no way of knowing what senior administration official uttered those words. I have to assume, though, that it was someone Cheney thought might help journalists see that protecting the identity of people who make self-serving statements does not benefit the public.
