PressEthic

While in prison for protecting the identity of a source for a story that she didn't write, Judith Miller spoke to her informant on the phone. According to her lawyer in an article in the New York Times, she then listened to the "the timbre and tone of the source's response and real feelings regarding whether or not he was being coerced and whether or not he really wanted her to testify."

Timbres and tones may unshackle her bones, but sources will never burn her. Why? Because even to professionals paid to understand this case, no one quite knows what happened here, or for that matter, why.

A justified reason for giving a government source anonymity is to allow for the case of the whistleblower; the guy or gal on the inside who knows something that goes against the official version put forth by the administration but will lose her job if her name is attached to this (true) information. But in this case, the source wasn't Joe Q. Public Servant. It was I. Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff. Whistleblower he is not. Rather, this is like giving the wolf anonymity in a story about pig's houses getting blown down.

In an article in Slate, Jacob Weisberg argues that journalists have a right to out sources under certain circumstances. In this case, Miller's refusal to identify her source certainly seems counterintuitive to her responsibility as a journalist.

What sacred cow of journalism was she protecting? The right to get spun and made a party to an administration's vengeful rebuttal to an op-ed piece it didn't like? The right to decide that a release from anonymity only counts when you've been in jail for 12 weeks?

The use of anonymous sources is one for individual publications to decide, on the basis of their readership's tolerance for them. But for any journalist who is allowed to provide anonymity, whom you are protecting may be just as important as what. Judith Miller wasn't protecting Deep Throat. She wasn't toppling a corrupt administration, showing that cigarettes cause cancer, or uncovering My Lai.

What she was doing was protecting a source that didn't exactly need protection. Why would Libby fear the official government, if, in effect, he was the official government?

In researching this article, it was somewhat disconcerting to read the word "confusing," or some variation thereof, written by many very intelligent people in articles about this case. The Times owes us all an explanation for Judith Miller's stand, without putting her on a pedestal.