PressEthic

Beyond her attempt to cast herself into the mold of a hero of journalism, what Judith Miller's personal account of the events that led to her imprisonment shows is how misuse of unnamed sources benefits the government more than the public.

This fundamentally undercuts the reasoning behind unnamed sources. As I mentioned in a previous post, one of the only valid reasons for using an unnamed source is for the case of the whistleblower – a person who knows something contrary to a corporation or government's official party line and rightly fears losing her job if her name is attached the information. In this case, Miller didn't protect a whistleblower with the umbrella of anonymity, but instead protected the Vice President's Chief of Staff. This is like giving the wolf anonymity in a story about pigs' houses getting blown down.

The manipulation of the public can easily be seen in Miller's account of her testimony. In one conversation with Libby, she writes:

My recollection, I told him, was that Mr. Libby wanted to modify our prior understanding that I would attribute information from him to a "senior administration official." When the subject turned to Mr. Wilson, Mr. Libby requested that he be identified only as a "former Hill staffer." I agreed to the new ground rules because I knew that Mr. Libby had once worked on Capitol Hill.

This cat and mouse game with the facts fools the public into thinking that the source is not an administration official. Instead, this person is part of the mysterious ether of once working on the Hill – a group that includes tens of thousands of people. This is like interviewing Jimmy Carter and attributing the information to a "former peanut farmer." Well, yes, to parse Miller, I know that Mr. Carter had once worked on a peanut farm. But perhaps it's a bit more relevant to mention the executive branch of government. Miller gives no reasoning to agreeing to the switch except that it's true that Libby once worked on the Hill. Her readers deserve to know more. Or perhaps it's part of the special brand of unquestioning interaction with sources that led Miller to get hoodwinked by Ahmad Chalabi .

A couple of paragraphs later, Miller goes on to recall that

" With the understanding that I would attribute the information to an administration official, Mr. Libby also sought to explain why Mr. Bush included the disputed uranium allegation in his 2003 State of the Union address, a sentence of 16 words that his administration would later retract."

First Libby's a "former Hill staffer," and now he's an "administration official." To the lay reader comparing the two articles, Miller makes it sound like Libby's two different people. The version of facts that he gives suddenly seems more relevant and trustworthy, because two independent sources verified it.

The result is that the administration makes its' attack seem more broad, and the public is none the wiser. Instead of fulfilling journalism's edict to cast sunshine on the workings of an administration, Miller clouded the facts of the case, and most importantly, let her readers down.