jschool05

USA Today's Pentagon Reporter Resigns Under Pressure

2005-05-05T18:45:00.000-04:00

WashPost:

A USA Today Pentagon correspondent, Tom Squitieri, resigned under pressure today after the paper learned he had lifted quotes from another newspaper for a front-page story and used several other quotes, without attribution, that were cut during the editing process.

In a March 28 piece on the Army falling behind in ordering armored Humvees for Iraq, Squitieri quoted Brian Hart of Bedford, Mass., whose son was killed in the war. The same quote appeared, word for word, in the Indianapolis Star in May 2004:

"My son called me the week before he was killed. He said they were getting shot at all the time. They were in unarmored Humvees and were out there exposed to the fire. He was concerned they were going to get hit. He was literally whispering this into the phone to me. He was right. That's how he died."

Squitieri also used a three-sentence quote from Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) -- about the Pentagon having "consistently underestimated" the need for more armored Humvees -- that had appeared in the same piece in the Star, which like USA Today is a Gannett paper.

Print Insists It's Here to Stay

2005-05-02T14:41:00.000-04:00

NYT:

These faux futuristic covers are part of a $40-million, three-year campaign by the magazine industry to win advertisers and try to convince them that magazines, which have existed in the United States for nearly 250 years, are likely to be here for the next 250, come what may. At the same time, the newspaper industry has begun a multimillion-dollar, three-year campaign to make over its image in the eyes of advertisers.

The Newspaper Association of America has hired the Martin Agency of Richmond, Va. - whose clients include United Parcel Service, Geico and Miller beer - to help change the perception of newspapers from stodgy to contemporary.

The Magazine Publishers of America hired HotSpring, a brand development company in New York, for ideas on how the industry could reposition itself and the ad agency Fallon New York to reach the advertising industry. This is the first time that magazines have joined together in a large-scale marketing effort.

It is no secret: Print feels threatened as never before. Newspapers and magazines may have complained when radio and television came along. But they seem to be in full panic mode now as readers and advertisers flock to the Internet.

With their advertising campaigns, poor old print is declaring that it's not going to take it anymore.

"Enough!" John Kimball, chief marketing officer for the Newspaper Association of America, said in an interview. "You read things that the industry is dead, that the Internet is eating our lunch, that everyone is watching television, that national advertising is declining in the major metros."

"But the medium is very strong," Mr. Kimball said. "There are lots of ads in the papers, and not because those people think they're making a charitable contribution. They're investing in the medium because it's delivering results."

Newspapers are generally profitable but they leave Wall Street unenthusiastic. A Goldman, Sachs report last week warned investors that "lackluster ad revenue growth, weak circulation revenues" and "a downward trend in earnings estimates" reinforced its "negative view" of the newspaper industry. And recent disclosures of inflated circulation figures have soured the climate for some advertisers.

Words to Live By

2005-04-23T22:52:00.000-04:00

"It's only a newspaper. It eventually comes to this: Journalism itself is inadequate to tell this story. Like recorded music, which is only a facsimile of music, journalism is a substitute, a stand-in. It's what we call on when we can't know something firsthand. It's not reality, but a version of reality, and both daily deadlines and limited space make even the best journalism a reductionist version of reality."

-- Daniel Okrent, Public Editor
"The Hottest Button: How The Times Covers Israel and Palestine"
The New York Times
April 24, 2005

Symposium

2005-04-12T10:04:00.000-04:00

Congrats to Sam on putting together a great symposium on Journalism and the Law yesterday.

In other news:

CJR: Columbia Spectator 1, NYT 0

2005 Pulitzers Announced

2005-04-04T17:35:00.000-04:00

Pulitzer winners for journalism

The main Pulitzer site is down. That doesn't look good, fellas.

New on the Wire: AP to Offer Two Leads for Some Stories

2005-03-17T03:14:00.000-05:00

E&P: (via TechDirt)

NEW YORK Attention Associated Press members, prepare to get more for your money: Now available, two leads for the price of one.

In a break with tradition at the 156-year-old news cooperative, the AP will now offer two different leads for many of its news stories, the organization confirmed Wednesday.

"The concept is simple: On major spot stories -- especially when events happen early in the day -- we will provide you with two versions to choose between," the AP said in an advisory to members. "One will be the traditional 'straight lead' that leads with the main facts of what took place. The other will be the 'optional,' an alternative approach that attempts to draw in the reader through imagery, narrative devices, perspective or other creative means."

The advisory added that the change is an attempt to "enhance the value of the AP news report to your newspaper." The AP serves about 1,700 members.

. . .

An example of the differing leads:

Traditional

MOSUL, Iraq (AP) A suicide attacker set off a bomb that tore through a funeral tent jammed with Shiite mourners Thursday, splattering blood and body parts over rows of overturned white plastic chairs. The attack, which killed 47 and wounded more than 100, came as Shiite and Kurdish politicians in Baghdad said they overcame a major stumbling block to forming a new coalition government.

Optional

MOSUL, Iraq (AP) Yet again, almost as if scripted, a day of hope for a new, democratic Iraq turned into a day of tears as a bloody insurgent attack undercut a political step forward.

On Thursday, just as Shiite and Kurdish politicians in Baghdad were telling reporters that they overcame a major stumbling block to forming a new coalition government, a suicide attacker set off a bomb that tore through a funeral tent jammed with Shiite mourners in the northern city of Mosul.

Frank Rich, That's Who!

2005-03-11T15:15:00.000-05:00

Frank Rich (with a little help from Pinch and Bill Keller and Ms. Collins) steps up to the plate and says, "You know what, you motherf*ckers? It's time to bring the pain down on your ass!" In much more eloquent prose, of course.

But seriously folks, you've got to hand it to Mr. Rich. Here's a guy who clearly feels he needs to bring a level of game that would shame "the Game." This is sweet. The Jeff Gannons of the world better duck.

When people start complaining about, Ohhhhh, Frank Rich is so liberal, Ohhhhhh, "Frank Rich's rantings have now become embarrassing both to him and to The Times," I just want to say, well, "Who's got a 1500 word weekly column in the Paper of Record, and who's got a trashy, cynical, screamfest tv show an Pretenda-News Network?"

This is going to get good.
--
""In his time at The Times," Mr. Keller and Ms. Collins said in a note to the staff, "Frank Rich has repeatedly set milestones in the world of critical journalism. As a theater critic, he took his assignment beyond play-reviewing to become a ferocious and influential champion of what is good and original in the art form. As an Op-Ed columnist he pioneered a longer form of essay, which he performed while simultaneously writing in even greater depth for the magazine.

"At Arts & Leisure he developed his own brand of social criticism, in a column that combined intensive reporting, immersion in the popular culture and a unique gift for seeing connections between culture and public life."

Mr. Rich's column will be essay length, about twice the wordage of a typical Op-Ed column. It will "continue to mine the fertile field of popular culture, but with Op-Ed's greater license" for opinion writing, The Times said. In addition to his column, the expanded opinion pages will now include two other regular columnists each Sunday, as well as a guest columnist and the Public Editor column, moving from Page 2 of the Week in Review.

Mr. Keller and Ms. Collins said Mr. Rich would have offices in both the Op-Ed department and the arts section, where he will be the senior adviser to the culture editor. As he has for the last two years, they said, he will monitor trends in the cultural worlds and recruit and develop talent. Mr. Rich's final Arts & Leisure column will appear on March 27. His Op-Ed column will begin on April 10."
--

Who is a journalist?

2005-03-10T17:06:00.000-05:00

Slate tackles the issue.

Win One For CJR

2005-03-09T13:49:00.000-05:00

This, rock fans, is what I'm talking about. I challenge anyone to produce a better account of this whole messed up debacle/constitutional crisis/future-of-western civ-at-stake/kind of dorky-I-suppose subject which we now find ourselves obsessed with.
--
Columbia Journalism Review
Attack At The Source
Why the Plame case is so scary

By Douglas McCollam

In November 1969 Paul Branzburg, a twenty-eight-year-old reporter with the Louisville Courier-Journal, spent a few days hanging out with two local men for a story about how they planned to clear $5,000 making and selling a batch of hashish. The resulting article, THE HASH THEY MAKE ISN'T TO EAT, ran in the paper’s November 15 edition. In it Branzburg, a graduate of Harvard Law School and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, revealed that he had changed the men’s names to protect their identity. The article was meant, Branzburg’s lawyer would later say, to inform readers about the views of “hippies and dissidents” who were becoming an increasingly influential presence in American life. For their part, “Larry” and “Jack” said the main reason they let Branzburg do the story was to “make the narcs mad.”

Mission accomplished. Shortly after the story ran, Branzburg was subpoenaed by the Jefferson County district attorney to appear before a state grand jury investigating the local drug trade. He was asked twice to name the men he had observed in possession of marijuana. He refused to answer and was held in contempt of court. Undaunted, Branzburg later wrote another exposé, this time detailing pot use in Frankfort, Kentucky’s capital city. He was again hauled before a grand jury and asked about the criminal acts he had observed. He again refused to testify.

During the next two years Branzburg’s appeal wound its way up to the United States Supreme Court and became the lead case in a series of disputes concerning what was then called the “newsman’s” privilege: the right of reporters not to reveal the sources for their stories, even if those sources were observed engaging in criminal conduct. It was the first time the Court had squarely faced the issue, and in vigorous questioning of Branzburg’s lawyer, Edgar Zingman, the justices struggled to outline the scope of the privilege they were being asked to recognize. Wasn’t Branzburg asking for the right to exist above the law? Justice Potter Stewart wondered. And, if the privilege was based on the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee, couldn’t any citizen claim the same right to refuse to testify? Who qualified for the privilege? wondered Chief Justice Warren Burger. Would it cover a private citizen who investigated a crime and then wrote a letter to the editor about it? How about pamphleteers? Would the authors of the Federalist Papers have qualified as “newsmen”?

Zingman bobbed and weaved, arguing for a broad privilege unless there was cause to believe the reporter had specific information about ongoing threats to national security, or a person’s life or liberty, and there was no other way to obtain the information. The Court rejected the argument. In a 5-4 decision, the Court found that there was no constitutional basis for a reporter to refuse to answer questions before a grand jury about sources, provided the investigation was in good faith. “From the beginning of our country the press has operated without constitutional protection for press informants,” Justice Byron “Whizzer” White wrote for the majority, “and the press has flourished.”

I thought about White’s conclusion as I sat on a wooden bench in federal court last December, rereading the decision and waiting for arguments to begin in what many consider to be the most important test case on press freedoms since Branzburg was handed down more than thirty years ago.

Was the press still flourishing? Just a few feet away Judith Miller, of The New York Times, and Matthew Cooper, of Time magazine, stood nervously chatting with small knots of supporters in a courtroom well stocked with Washington’s fabled media elite — many of whom appeared almost as antsy as Miller and Cooper. Both reporters were appealing prison sentences of up to eighteen months for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating who in the Bush administration revealed the identity of the CIA agent Valerie Plame to the press, presumably in violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. (Conspicuously absent was Robert Novak, the syndicated columnist who actually outed Plame in print.) Though Miller’s and Cooper’s cases have drawn the most attention, they are hardly the only reporters recently to run afoul of the law.

* In Rhode Island the investigative reporter James Taricani is serving six months of house arrest for refusing to say who gave him an incriminating videotape made in connection with a corruption investigation.
* In Washington a federal judge is holding five reporters in contempt for refusing to name their sources in stories about Wen Ho Lee, the nuclear scientist named by the press as suspected of passing secrets to the Chinese.
* In California FBI agents raided the home of Victor Conte, not to gather evidence for the government’s case against Conte’s BALCO labs, the company alleged to have provided designer steroids to star athletes, but to discover who leaked grand jury testimony from the case to the San Francisco Chronicle.
* In addition to leading the investigation into the Plame case, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is also seeking the phone records of Miller and her fellow Times reporter Philip Shenon in an investigation into an Islamic charity suspected of being tied to terrorism.
* The Justice Department has also been asked to launch an investigation into who leaked details of a secret satellite program, code-named “Misty,” to The Washington Post.

When those cases are viewed together, many see them as constituting a moment of peril for journalism. Reporters have never been popular, but there has long been a sense that most Americans understood, in the words of Justice Stewart, that though the press could be “abusive, untruthful, arrogant, and hypocritical,” it was nonetheless necessary to the health of the republic. No more. The reason given for this attitudinal shift depends largely on where a person stands on the ideological spectrum. Liberals see the change as an inevitable result of the reactionary acid drip that has been eroding public esteem for the press since at least the civil rights movement. Conservatives view the switch as an overdue comeuppance for a smug bunch of elitists who appointed themselves as a praetorian guard of American civic life. A more neutral perspective may chalk up the change to a predictable backlash to the proliferation of invasive media in the information age. Whatever the reason, all sides agree that public regard for journalism is at a low ebb. As Ken Auletta recently put it in a piece in The New Yorker about how the White House views the media, the press is now seen as “simply another interest group, and, moreover, an interest group that’s not nearly as powerful as it was.”

Part of the frustration for critics of the press has historically been its thick insulation from liability. First Amendment guarantees make libel actions costly and difficult to win, particularly for public figures. But as Branzburg made clear, those First Amendment protections may guard the final product but don’t necessarily extend to newsgathering. In the 1990s, corporations began exploiting that vulnerability, challenging journalists not so much on the truth of what they wrote or broadcast, but over how they obtained their information. Thus reporters might find themselves accused of “tortious interference with contract” for “inducing” an employee to breach a confidentiality agreement, or sued for fraud if they lied on job applications to go to work for a company undercover. These claims were not slam-dunk winners in court, but for a press that increasingly was a small appendage of a corporate conglomerate, the danger of having to record large judgments on a balance sheet had the desired chilling effect. The key to the threat, of course, was the conviction that the public (read jurors) hated the media even more than it hated big corporations.

In the new century, government and private lawyers seem to have taken their cue from corporations, and begun their own attacks on newsgathering. In particular, they have homed in on the right of reporters to keep sources confidential. “This is by far the most activity I’ve ever seen attacking journalists’ sources,” says Nathan Siegel, a Washington lawyer who represents several media companies. “If you’d told me five years ago I’d be spending the majority of my time fighting over whether reporters could keep sources confidential, you could have knocked me over with a feather.”

Not everyone is clanging the alarm. Jack Shafer, the media critic for Slate, thinks the current run of cases are significant but have received inflated coverage because they involve a lot of prominent Washington reporters. “There is a little bit of hysterical nonsense going on here,” says Shafer. “The fact is, prosecutors demand sources all the time.” Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago, says that by not testifying about an illegal leak Miller and Cooper are trying to put themselves beyond the reach of the law. “There is no legitimate interest in shielding criminal conduct,” says Stone. “It’s an awkward case to be asserting a privilege on.” Bob Woodward, perhaps the preeminent investigative reporter of his time, believes in supporting journalists who are protecting sources. Yet he sees the use of confidentiality in this case — to hide the sources who identified Valerie Plame — as a weak reed to lean on. “I use confidential sources more than most anyone,” Woodward concedes, “but it has to be worth the risk involved. I don’t think outing Plame was worth the risk.”

To Judith Miller, however, focusing on the significance of the Plame leak misses the larger issue of whether the government should be able to compel a reporter’s testimony about sources. “I’ve always been the same reporter,” Miller told me. “I’m fanatical about protecting sources because I think they are crucial to reporting and investigative reporting in particular.” In this she has the clear backing of the Times brass. “We didn’t choose this fight, but we’ve got a reporter who feels honor bound and there is a risk she could go to jail,” says Bill Keller, the Times’s executive editor. “That’s not something we can stand by and watch.” Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is even more adamant, placing the Plame case alongside other landmark legal stands the paper has taken on freedom of the press. “We know Washington works on the basis of confidential sources,” Sulzberger says. “If we can’t protect those people we’ll be filling our paper with press releases and agency reports.”

OUT OF AFRICA
Of the current cases winding through the justice system, it is Plame that poses the most immediate threat to journalism. To understand why, a quick review of the background of the case is useful. On July 6, 2003, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson (Valerie Plame’s husband) wrote a long op-ed piece for The New York Times critical of the Bush administration. In February 2002 Wilson had been sent to Africa by the CIA to check out information that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy enriched uranium from Niger to help make a nuclear bomb. The charge had been central to the administration’s case for a preemptive invasion of Iraq. But in his piece, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” Wilson largely debunked the story and essentially accused the administration of manipulating the evidence to help justify the invasion.

A week later the syndicated columnist Robert Novak, thought to have close ties to the administration, outed Plame in a column titled “The Mission to Niger.” The piece, which claimed that Plame had chosen her husband for the mission, was widely seen as payback by the administration against Wilson. (The column actually said several laudatory things about Wilson.) Figuring out what Novak has or has not told the grand jury about his sources on the story, identified in his piece only as “two senior administration officials,” is the Washington press corps’ favorite new parlor game. Novak has refused to speak on the matter and turned down my request for an interview, as did his lawyer, James Hamilton.

In the days following Novak’s column, a cry went up that not only had the Bush administration shivved a legitimate critic, but it had broken the law to do it. Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a person who learns the identity of a covert agent like Plame from classified information can get ten years in jail for intentionally disclosing the agent’s identity. The law specifies that the leaker must have had access to classified information about the agent and knew that the agent was a covert operative. Despite those caveats a drumbeat began for a criminal investigation and the appointment of a special prosecutor. Among those baying the loudest for blood, it should be noted, were many of the very news organizations now at odds with the investigation.

On December 30, 2003, the Justice Department appointed Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, as special counsel to investigate the Plame leak. Fitzgerald, forty-three, spent thirteen years in the U.S. attorney’s office in New York, prosecuting primarily organized-crime and terrorism cases. At the time of his appointment in Plame, Fitzgerald was already locked in a dispute with the Times over whether Philip Shenon, one of its reporters, had tipped off a Chicago-based Islamic charity in December 2001 about an impending FBI raid while reporting on a story. In September 2004, Fitzgerald told the Times he was seeking Shenon’s phone records in connection with that investigation as well those of Judith Miller on a related matter. “It’s really curious, if not suspicious, that the same prosecutor is going after confidential sources in a case that was dormant for two years until Plame perked up,” says George Freeman, the Times’s assistant general counsel.

In the months following his appointment in Plame, Fitzgerald conducted a series of interviews with top executive branch officials, including Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Karl Rove, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and ultimately the president and vice president. He also employed an unusual tactic: he had government officials sign waivers of confidentiality regarding conversations they might have had with reporters regarding Plame. In the spring and summer of 2004, Fitzgerald issued grand jury subpoenas to at least four journalists who had reported on various aspects of the Plame leak: Miller, Cooper, Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, and Tim Russert of NBC News. A fifth reporter, Glenn Kessler of the Post, was not formally subpoenaed, but was asked to talk with Fitzgerald regarding Plame. Novak will not confirm or deny receiving a subpoena.

To those involved in the investigation it became clear that Fitzgerald was focused on Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, as a likely source for the Plame leak. In an apparent effort to remove the crosshairs from his back, Libby released several reporters from their pledges of confidentiality. Russert and Kessler then agreed to give limited testimony to Fitzgerald, simply confirming that they had not discussed Plame in certain phone calls with Libby in July. Pincus also gave testimony exonerating Libby, after a different source on Plame okayed his talking with Fitzgerald. Matt Cooper talked with Fitzgerald at Libby’s urging, but balked at providing additional evidence about other sources when he was served with a second subpoena. Judith Miller, who had reported on the Plame leak but had never written a story, refused to give any testimony at all. In October, citing Miller’s and Cooper’s refusals, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan found both reporters in contempt and sentenced them to up to eighteen months in jail unless they complied with the subpoenas.

EVERY MAN’S EVIDENCE
Two months later at their appeal, Miller and Cooper were both represented by Floyd Abrams, the New York attorney widely viewed as the dean of the First Amendment bar. But on this day Abrams wasn’t accorded much respect by the three-judge panel hearing the appeal. In particular, Judge David Sentelle repeatedly challenged Abrams to distinguish Miller’s and Cooper’s refusals to testify before the grand jury from Paul Branzburg’s similar refusal thirty-five years earlier. Abrams attempted to parry the challenge, noting that there had been significant developments in the reporter’s privilege since Branzburg. Sentelle appeared unimpressed. Judge David Tatel was less overtly hostile, but like Justice Burger in Branzburg, seemed to struggle with the question of who would qualify for a reporter’s privilege. If an Internet blogger was illegally leaked nuclear secrets and posted it on her Web site, would she be entitled to refuse to testify about her source? the judges wondered. Abrams soft-shoed a bit before conceding that, under the privilege he was seeking, she would. A collective flinch rippled through the establishment media in the gallery.

In Branzburg, the central question was whether the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press could be extended to protect the identity of those who give the press information. The answer was no. But a brief concurrence written by Justice Lewis Powell, the crucial fifth vote in the case, held out the hope that future developments in the law might give rise to a court-recognized privilege. And First Amendment advocates contend that the “developments” Powell foresaw have come to pass. In 1972 when Branzburg was decided, only seventeen states had reporter “shield laws,” protecting reporters from being forced to out their sources. Now thirty-one do, plus the District of Columbia. Eighteen other states have controlling cases that recognize some form of the reporter’s privilege (Wyoming is the lone holdout).

Moreover, during the past three decades, courts have proven willing to recognize that certain kinds of communication should be shielded from discovery. The most recent example came in 1996 when the Supreme Court ruled that communications between a patient and a therapist or social worker were privileged under federal law. Some see that as directly analogous to the reporter-source privilege.

But as a general rule courts believe they have the right to “hear every man’s evidence,” and privileges against testifying are not favored in the law. Over time only a few such exemptions have been endorsed, including the attorney-client privilege, the doctor-patient privilege, the priest-penitent privilege, the spousal privilege, and, most recently, the therapist privilege. The Constitution also forbids compelling people to testify against themselves.

In Plame, Miller and Cooper argue that the reporter’s privilege should now be added to that list, but fashioning a reporter’s privilege presents special challenges. Perhaps the most obvious model is the attorney-client privilege. But this privilege had a long pedigree before being formally recognized in law. In addition, the attorney-client privilege belongs exclusively to the client. If he or she waives the privilege, the attorney can be compelled to testify. In the Plame investigation, government lawyers sought to nullify the reporter’s privilege claim by getting preemptive waivers signed by potential sources. The reporters (quite rightly) viewed these form waivers as bogus and coerced — Who wouldn’t sign a waiver with a prosecutor breathing down his neck? — but Miller and Cooper are arguing that as a legal matter, a waiver by the source doesn’t really matter, that the privilege belongs to the reporter.

This position, which squares with many reporters’ idea of the privilege, would seem to make the reporter’s privilege more akin to the husband-wife privilege. There the right of confidentiality also resides with both parties to the information, and is grounded more in respect for privacy rights and the institution of marriage. It seems unlikely the federal courts will grant reporters and sources similar deference. All the other recognized privileges involve inherently private information given to members of accredited professions. Journalism, by comparison, trades in public information and is less a profession than an activity in which anyone can engage. As the courts in both Branzburg and Plame have asked, Who qualifies as a “journalist” for purposes of the privilege? Some First Amendment lawyers I spoke with see the issue as a red herring. “It’s a much simpler issue than people make it out to be,” says Ted Boutrous, a Los Angeles lawyer who represents ABC News and other media clients. “For years state legislatures have been developing this privilege and it’s never turned into a big problem.” Judith Miller agrees: “It’s an issue that courts and legislatures can decide. It shouldn’t negate the privilege just because people may disagree about it. That’s looking at the tail as opposed to the animal.”

Nonetheless, the difficulty in crafting the reporter’s privilege has led most states to grant only qualified protection to reporter-source communications. In general, all the privileges have certain exceptions, but a qualified privilege more closely resembles a straight balancing test — between the privilege and the state’s or a citizen’s interest in obtaining information — than a firm exemption. It would be as if a court could say, in effect, “Hey, we believe in the attorney-client privilege, but this was a really heinous crime, so I’m afraid your lawyer is going to have to testify against you.” Floyd Abrams argues that a qualified privilege is an arbitrary privilege, and thus isn’t enough. He asked the court to recognize an unqualified privilege, one vested with reporters, not with sources. This led Judge Sentelle to observe that Abrams was trying to give journalists a kind of superprivilege, stronger even than those afforded to lawyers, doctors, priests, or therapists. Many reporters and First Amendment advocates feel the chance of a court’s recognizing that kind of privilege is nil. “I’m not totally opposed to a reporter’s privilege,” says Michael Kinsley of the Los Angeles Times. “What upsets me is the absolutist position the New York Times people take. Arthur and Bill deny they are absolutist, but I’ve never seen any suggestion from them of what circumstances they could imagine the privilege not being granted.”

PRIVATE ACTS, PUBLIC CONSEQUENCES
One concern about Plame I heard often was that it represents a breakdown of a tacit post-Branzburg truce between prosecutors and reporters that the government wouldn’t go after reporters’ sources. There is concern that the tactics used by Fitzgerald will be replicated by lawyers in other cases. That’s already happened in at least one instance. In October Thomas Connolly, a Washington lawyer representing the former army scientist Steven Hatfill, struck an unusual deal with the Department of Justice. Connolly submitted a list of about 160 news stories concerning the government’s investigation of Hatfill in connection with the anthrax letter attacks of 2001 and asked that waivers of confidentiality be given to potential sources for the stories. The waivers were reportedly circulated to more than a hundred people in the FBI and elsewhere. “I worry that if those kinds of waivers become commonplace tools of the government or employers it could potentially be a serious impediment for getting people inside large institutions to talk,” says Bill Keller of the Times. For his part, Connolly says he’s not after the reporters, but adds that he thinks reporters in recent years have far too often served as adjuncts to government power instead of acting as a check upon it. “In some regards the press is as bloated and arrogant as the institutions they are covering,” says Connolly. The lawyer says he plans to subpoena about a dozen reporters to testify about their sources in the Hatfill investigation.

Hatfill’s case against the government was brought under the Privacy Act, a 1974 law meant to prevent government agencies from releasing personal data about private citizens. Though the Plame leak has had more publicity, some First Amendment specialists and reporters think the Privacy Act cases pose a more meaningful long-term threat to newsgathering. In addition to Hatfill’s suit, the Privacy Act is being used by Wen Ho Lee to sue the government. In that case five journalists have been found in contempt for refusing to divulge their sources. Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, who has been served subpoenas in both the Plame and Wen Ho Lee matters, says the Privacy Act is being used improperly as an alternative for those who can’t win libel actions. Wen Ho Lee “was not libeled, and what we printed was accurate and he’s pleaded guilty,” says Pincus. (Lee pleaded guilty to a single count of illegally copying nuclear data.)

Brian Sun, Lee’s lawyer, says that despite the guilty plea, many allegations made against Lee, reported principally in stories written by Jeff Gerth and James Risen in The New York Times, were inaccurate. (In 2000 the Times ran a lengthy “Editors’ Note” saying aspects of its Wen Ho Lee coverage were flawed.) Like Connolly, Sun says he’s not really after the reporters, just the people who gave them information. But also like Connolly, Sun thinks the press was irresponsible regarding his client.

Needless to say, reporters see matters differently. Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times, one of the reporters held in contempt in the Lee case, thinks the way the law is being used in the Hatfill and Wen Ho Lee matters raises troubling questions. “Using the Privacy Act to get reporters to reveal their sources is a very insidious assault on the First Amendment,” Drogin says. “It’s not what Congress intended.” Drogin believes that if Wen Ho Lee’s suit succeeds, it could impact every police reporter who wants a suspect’s information. “It wouldn’t be a ‘chilling effect,’” Drogin says, “It would be a blizzard.”

THE ARMY YOU'VE GOT
Though the Privacy Act cases will grind on for years, the Plame case should come to a head much sooner. On February 15, a three-judge panel of the D.C. circuit court rejected Miller’s and Cooper’s appeals. They were poised to ask for a rehearing from the full court of appeals and, failing that, to try to take the case to the Supreme Court (four justices must agree to take the case). That’s a prospect many in journalism view with alarm.

In fact, among the more than two dozen reporters, lawyers, and editors I talked to for this article there was a real concern that, far from enhancing the reporter’s privilege, the Plame case could put a stake through its heart. In part this stems from the seedy particulars of the story itself. Like the porno king who must be transformed into a First Amendment martyr, there is a sense that the Plame outing through Novak by his sources was the kind of sleazy Beltway maneuver that represents the worst use of confidential information. Moreover, as in Branzburg, any reporters getting the leaks may have directly witnessed a crime being committed, the hardest situation in which to assert a privilege. Nonetheless, with Miller and Cooper losing their appeal and facing a year and a half in jail, their publishers are forced to defend them. “It’s not like we’d have a lot of alternatives,” the Times’s counsel George Freeman told me before the appeals court decision was handed down.

Though reluctant to come right out and say so publicly, it is clear that many reporters and press advocates are upset that the Times has allowed Plame to develop into a potential seminal test of the reporter’s privilege. (Cooper and Time get a pass, because he initially tried to work with Fitzgerald.) The desire to avoid this outcome seems to have played a role, for example, in how The Washington Post dealt with the Plame investigation. Though neither Walter Pincus nor Glenn Kessler were prepared to testify about confidential communications, the paper worked to defuse the impasse with the special prosecutor and was willing to be somewhat flexible in its approach to answering the subpoenas. For example, after his source on Plame (not Libby) authorized him to talk to Fitzgerald, Pincus agreed to give a deposition in which he confirmed the time, date, and length of his conversation with the source but would not reveal the source’s identity. In general, Pincus says, privilege or no privilege, reporters should calibrate carefully before making promises of confidentiality. “I feel very strongly that we ought to distinguish between information that is meant to embarrass someone and is not attributed, and important classified information that could lose your sources their jobs or get them prosecuted,” says Pincus. Woodward, an assistant managing editor at the Post, agrees that confidential sources should be used only for important matters and clearly thinks the Plame matter didn’t meet that test. “This is not the Pentagon Papers,” Woodward dryly observes. “It’s not the case you’d choose to make law on.”

By contrast, in our interview Arthur Sulzberger directly invoked the Pentagon Papers case in justifying the Times’s hard stand in Plame. And if others are put out with Miller and the Times, it’s just as clear that Miller and the Times are less than thrilled with the tepid support they received from the Post, NBC — and Novak, who has refused any public comment on the case. “Every journalist has to live with his own conscience on this issue,” Miller says. “I don’t think it is helpful to divide the media at this point by criticizing others . . . . I’m not going to discuss what other people have decided to do.” Her lawyer is a bit more blunt: “People are right to be worried, but if they’re vexed, I’m vexed a bit by all the journalists who won’t stand with us,” Floyd Abrams says. “We’d have a lot stronger case right now if we had six in the dock instead of two.”

Sulzberger declined to “point fingers” at other media organizations, but said fear of losing the case was not a good reason not to fight it. “If you don’t stand for what you believe in, don’t risk a decision because you think you might lose, I think, quite frankly, that is a short-sighted approach.” For his part, Bill Keller says he’s not an absolutist on the reporter’s privilege and concedes that the facts in Plame aren’t ideal, but cops a line from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to explain the paper’s position: “Hey, you go to war with the army you’ve got,” Keller says.

While among First Amendment lawyers there is a lack of enthusiasm for Plame as a test case, there is also a divide over whether it will necessarily go to the Supreme Court and be precedent-setting. With the Court of Appeals reaffirming that there is no reporter’s privilege, the Supreme Court might be happy to take a pass, as it has done on several other post-Branzburg privilege cases. Since, however, the appeals court also split over the question of whether a common-law privilege has developed in the last thirty years, the Supreme Court may feel more obligated to clean up the discrepancies in the lower courts. If that happens, most lawyers think that the current Court, with its concern over privacy issues, would squarely come down on the side of the narrow reading of Branzburg. “It’s a dangerous time to take a privilege case to the Supreme Court,” says Charles Tobin, a Washington media lawyer who spent eight years as in-house counsel for Gannett Company. “I’m not optimistic. Federal courts increasingly see the administration of justice as the ultimate end that trumps all other interests.”

Several lawyers I spoke with point to a July 2003 decision by Judge Richard Posner as a potential harbinger for Plame. In that case Posner, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, who has been called the most influential jurist in America, handed down a decision that many think unnecessarily gut-shot the reporter’s privilege. The case stemmed from the prosecution, in Ireland, of Michael McKevitt, a member of a violent splinter faction of the Irish Republican Army. He asked a federal court in Chicago to subpoena tape recordings made by some journalists working on a biography of a state witness in his prosecution, and the court agreed. The journalists asked the appeals court to block the trial court’s order, but the request was denied and the tapes were turned over. Then a month later Posner issued an opinion elaborating on the court’s reasoning. Posner wrote that “rather surprisingly” a large number of federal courts after Branzburg had decided that there was a reporter’s privilege, a conclusion Posner found “audacious.” Posner was dismissive of the notion that a reporter would have any basis to keep information confidential when the source did not object to its disclosure. Likewise, Posner found that courts that granted reporters a privilege on nonconfidential sources, in order to guard them from harassment or keep them from becoming an investigative adjunct to the government, were “skating on thin ice.” Rather, Posner thought, Branzburg indicated that subpoenas of journalists should be treated the same as subpoenas issued to anyone else.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporter’s Committee on Freedom of the Press, was among several people I spoke to who found Posner’s decision gratuitous. “For thirty years things looked pretty rosy. Then Posner writes this opinion — no briefs, no oral argument — just him reading Branzburg to say the whole idea of a reporter’s privilege is ludicrous, there is no such thing.” Dalglish thinks Posner’s opinion was an ignition switch for subsequent attacks on the reporter’s privilege. Others give the case less importance, but no one doubts Posner’s towering influence and many fear McKevitt could serve as a preview to what the Supreme Court could do with Plame.

RAISING THE SHIELD
For that reason several media companies and First Amendment advocacy groups are looking to head off a Court ruling through legislative action. A bill based on the Justice Department’s guidelines for subpoenaing a reporter’s records was introduced in the House of Representatives by Michael Pence of Indiana, a Republican, and Rick Boucher of Virginia, a Democrat. Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, introduced the Senate version. Earlier, Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, introduced a federal reporter’s shield law drafted with input from the Media Law Resource Center, the Reporters Committee, and in-house lawyers for several large media companies.

Dalglish and others say the media are united as never before in seeking to get a shield law through Congress. “One thing we have going for us is that there isn’t a single pol up there who hasn’t been a confidential source,” says Dalglish, who is actively lobbying for the bill. “They have a better understanding of what’s at stake than most citizens do.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time the idea of a federal shield law has been raised. In Branzburg the Court held that Congress was free to fashion a newsman’s privilege “as narrow or broad as deemed necessary.” After the decision many lawmakers attempted to do just that. By the following winter The Washington Post reported that ninety-one representatives and seventeen senators had either introduced or cosponsored press shield laws. Hearings were held, and reporters, lawyers, and publishers testified about the need for the law. But even with a heavily Democratic Congress, locked in its own Watergate-era battles with the Nixon administration, the bills failed to pass. So it may be fairly asked what chance does a shield law have three decades later with a ruling majority not noted for its regard for the press?

Much like Plame, Branzburg arrived during a time of peril for the press. During the first two years of the Nixon administration CBS and NBC alone were served more than fifty subpoenas by the government. This magazine warned at the time that a “subpoena epidemic” was overtaking American journalism, threatening to turn reporters into a “de-facto arm of the Attorney General’s office.” Though the Justice Department adopted stricter guidelines in 1970 on subpoenaing reporters, Branzburg seemed to accelerate the trend for a time. Lawyers for Vice President Spiro Agnew, a vociferous press critic, hit eight reporters with subpoenas over leaks in the government’s criminal investigation of his financial dealings (Agnew would resign in October of 1973 in a bribery scandal). So many reporters were either in jail or facing the prospect of going there for defying subpoenas that one editor quipped to The New York Times that a hacksaw was becoming a standard issue item in the modern journalist’s tool kit.

But it is also worth noting that Branzburg was handed down just twelve days before the break-in at the Watergate Hotel in 1972 that lead to the resignation of a president and perhaps the most triumphant moment in the history of the American press. And despite all the dire predictions after Branzburg, the decision did little to impede the reporting that Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and others did for the story. When the Committee To Re-Elect the President (CREEP) sought to pry Watergate materials from the Post, the Times, and Time magazine, a federal judge quashed the subpoena, citing the “possible chilling effect the enforcement of these subpoenas would have on the flow of information to the press and, thus, the public.”

As for Paul Branzburg, after losing at the Supreme Court he was sentenced to six months in jail. He had moved on to Michigan to work for The Detroit Free Press, but Wendell Ford, Kentucky’s governor, personally lobbied Governor William Milliken of Michigan to extradite the reporter back to the Bluegrass state for sentencing. Milliken refused and Branzburg never returned to Kentucky or served a day in jail.

Journalists are hoping for a similar outcome in the Plame case. One of the ironies of the privilege debate is that whenever freedom of the press collides with criminal investigations, both reporters and lawyers invoke the “public’s right to know” as a justification for their stand. Judith Miller and the Times have done so often and loudly in the Plame case, and though Special Counsel Fitzgerald has refrained from making public comments, the words of the prosecutor seeking to jail Peter Bridge in New Jersey in the 1970s for refusing to testify before a grand jury, may sum up his feelings: “To deter grand jury investigation would prevent the body from properly performing its public duty and would subvert the very values which defendant purports to protect.”

Part of the clash between lawyers and journalists can be attributed to their shared populist bent. As Stephen Bates, a former prosecutor for Kenneth Starr in the Whitewater investigation and literary editor of The Wilson Quarterly, notes, both reporters and prosecutors are “professional snoops — curious, analytical, skeptical. Both pursue truth and . . . both believe that their work serves society, a belief (however justified) that sometimes engenders self-righteousness, obstinacy and hypersensitivity.”

Of course, there are some major differences as well. Prosecutors have the power to put people in jail, journalists don’t, at least not directly. The resurgence in willingness of the judicial and executive branches to attack the Fourth Estate at the source is as troubling now as it was three decades ago. And back then the decision in Branzburg was greeted with calls for increased press protections from the public and politicians of both parties. Would anyone expect a similar public outcry of support today for journalists if Judith Miller and Matt Cooper go to jail?

Didn’t think so.
--
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© 2005 Columbia Journalism Review at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism

Keeping Up The Pressure!

2005-03-03T17:50:00.000-05:00

Threat to jail reporters is over the top
New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Threat to jail reporters is over the top

Thursday, March 3rd, 2005

If not for anonymous sources, there wouldn't be a newspaper printed in this country - at least not one worth reading. Off-the-record interviews with confidential sources would be impossible. And the black box known as government would grow ever more opaque.

Bash journalists as you wish, but without them most of the corruption, sloth and ineptitude in our public institutions would never see daylight. And without being able to safeguard their confidential sources - a practice traditionally protected by the First Amendment - journalists would rarely be able to get their fingers around the facts.

"Watergate is the prime example where we needed confidential sources," said journalist Carl Bernstein of "All the President's Men" fame. "We made agreements of confidentiality with our sources back then that we honor to this day."

But now that vital confidentiality is being put at risk unnecessarily as two top national journalists face jail in a legal case that has as many holes as a city street after a snowstorm.

Rewind to July 2003 when columnist Robert Novak revealed the name of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was then blasting the Bush administration for making bogus claims that Saddam Hussein had obtained uranium from Niger. Novak attributed the information to two senior Bush officials.

In government, of course, leaks are daily fare. But this one seemed different because it's a felony to reveal a covert federal agent's identity, according to a 1982 statute. The law, however, sets high standards and is rarely invoked. For instance: the leaker must know the person being exposed is a covert agent; the leaker must know the government is actively trying to conceal the agent's relationship to the United States and the covert agent must have served abroad in the last five years.

"According to these standards, the Novak case is more than questionable," said Victoria Toensing, who was the top Senate lawyer involved in drafting the 1982 law. "Every fact I know tells me the CIA did not take sufficient steps to hide Plame's identity. There is a huge question over whether the law was even broken in this case."

That's why it's a sin for Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine - neither of whom ever identified Plame, although they apparently got the same leak as Novak - to face the prospect of jail.

They followed the creed that, whether hero or snake, a source gets protected. Their reward? A judge threatens them with up to 18 months in jail. That ruling was just upheld on appeal. Their last chance will be in the Supreme Court, which must reverse this insidious ruling.

"If this were a murder, I'd say Miller should go to jail for withholding evidence," said Toensing. "In this case, we're far from sure a crime was committed. We ought to figure that out first."

The real crime, however, is weakening the institution of journalism. Subvert the fundamental faith in a reporter's confidentiality and our window into the black box called government shrinks.

Rob Corddry is my new hero

2005-03-01T10:24:00.000-05:00

Newsday:

The reporter was fake, using a fake name, spoofing alleged fake White House reporter "Jeff Gannon." But the news conference was real serious.

A "correspondent" from the fake news show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, was outside City Hall yesterday to get some answers from City Council Speaker Gifford Miller.

Wearing a badly groomed hair piece, a fake mustache and an ugly 1970s tie, Rob Corddry waited patiently until after the real reporters had posed their questions to ask one about about Social Security.

Standing awkwardly with his legs far apart as though he were getting ready to sprint, nodding in agreement to every word spoken by Miller about the West Side Stadium, Corddry finally raised his hand.

"Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker," he shouted, as if in a White House news conference, identifying himself as "Dino Ironbody"

His question: "How do you feel about the president's awesome plan to privatize Social Security?"

The Wisdom of Calvin and Hobbes

2005-03-01T10:18:00.000-05:00

Calling J-School Baseball Fans

2005-02-28T14:41:00.000-05:00

May 8, Sunday, 1:05 pm
A's vs. Yanks
Yankee Stadium

April 30, Saturday, 7:05 pm
Mets vs. Nationals
RFK Stadium

Who's down?

Email me:

cfarivar@cfarivar.org

this may be the most i've ever heard lemann say about us

2005-02-22T11:35:00.000-05:00

"Is he a hero at Columbia Journalism School?" asked Nicholas Lemann, the school's 50-year-old dean. "Sadly, I think no. He's much more a hero to my generation of journalists. He's sort of a giant, but I don't think rising young journalists are reading him with the same degree of admiration."

Duke: Against Atavism, 1937-2005

2005-02-21T16:26:00.000-05:00

--
"For Mr. Thompson the goal was to tell the truth - at least his version of the truth - and it did not much matter how he got there. "Fiction," Mr. Thompson said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2003, "is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist. You have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it."
...
[His] early work presaged some of the fundamental changes that have rocked journalism today. Mr. Thompson's approach in many ways mirrors the style of modern-day bloggers, those self-styled social commentators who blend news, opinion and personal experience on Internet postings. Like bloggers, Mr. Thompson built his case for the state of America around the framework of his personal views and opinions.”[Ed: !]
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/22/books/22thompson.html
--
http://jschool05.blogspot.com/2005/02/1937-2005.html
http://www.gonzo.org/
http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20050220/NEWS/102210004
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/022105Z.shtml
http://www.livejournal.com/users/docgonzo19/3127.html
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=1428
http://www.iamcorrect.blogspot.com/
--
“Hunter S. Thompson had the gift and burden of being able to see the truth. He lived and died by his own truth, and he could not understand why so many around him were living lies. The problem is that not everyone has the courage to live so honestly according to what is in their heart.

Vayo Con Dios, brave one. You will be missed.”
http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/books/booknewsandreviews/index.html?offset=6193&fid=.f328a27/6193

"I read every word he ever published. If you want to know him, read his published letters. There is a great sadness attached to his brutal death. A sadness that will not soon pass. The famous and imfamous will rush to praise him and recall their brushes with his madness and how they barely saved their own souls by escaping in the nick of time. If you want to know how he feels about these thinly veiled self-promotional activities ... read his letters. If you want to touch his genius, go to the passage near the end of Hell's Angels and read the passage about ripping down the highway on a motorcycle at impossible speeds. There is only one guy I want to hear from at this moment ... Johnny Depp. Hunter let Depp inside his bubble at the end. I want to know what Depp has to say. Everyone else is just banging their own drum."
http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/books/booknewsandreviews/index.html?offset=6192&fid=.f328a27/6192

It is nice to see the love pouring out over the press in regards to Hunter. He is still respected by the finest writers.
He went to a place Homer wrote about. Herman Melville would have traded places with HST. Mark Twain and Hemingway were a far second. He wrote about things we were afraid of. We learned about our dark side from him. But was it really so dark? It must have been his time. His angels were definately there with him in the agony of his last moment. Some die and no one even knows. He was a lucky, talented and inspired many.
Hope you have caught the fleeting raimbow. RIP"
http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/books/booknewsandreviews/index.html?offset=6203&fid=.f328a27/6203

"Like Hemingway, Dr. Thompson wrote with masculinity and precision, yet at the same time we can see an extraordinary sensitivity and creative mind that sought to explore the truth through the written word. As to his death, we cannot call his suicide an act of cowardice or bravery, we will never be able to fully understand why he chose to leave, and we are in no position to judge what he did as we cannot experience the kinds of barriers he must have faced. But Hunter is gone and the field of journalism has lost a real hero and probably doesnt even know it."
http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/books/booknewsandreviews/index.html?offset=6200&fid=.f328a27/6200
--
"When The Going Gets Weird, The Weird Turn Pro." - Hunter S.
Thompson, 1937 - 2005

Bill Keller and Jeff Jarvis

2005-02-21T12:27:00.000-05:00

Jeff Jarvis:

The other day, I wrote an open letter here to Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, suggesting that we should get professional and citizen journalists, Timesmen and bloggers, together to find common ground. Mr. Keller responded.

Let me first confess that I'm late telling you about that response because, well, I'm lazy or busy (pick your excuse). I didn't even respond to Mr. Keller for two days because I didn't want to just dash off an email to the editor of the damned NY Times. He emailed me here and there wondering what had become of his response and my manners. So I apologize to him and you for not making it clear earlier that he responded promptly.

We had an enjoyable if sandy exchange of email. I said I would blog that we'd had that and wouldn't say more yet because the exchange wasn't over. He said I could blog as much of the emails as I wanted. He outdid me in the transparency derby and boy, am I embarrassed.

U.S. newspaper industry struggling

2005-02-20T18:51:00.000-05:00

WashPost:

"Print is dead," Sports Illustrated President John Squires told a room full of newspaper and magazine circulation executives at a conference in Toronto in November. His advice? "Get over it," meaning publishers should stop trying to save their ink-on-paper product and focus on electronic delivery of their journalism.

Rare is the paper these days that is not embracing the Web. In addition to their own sites, papers such as the New York Times, the Miami Herald and the Houston Chronicle e-mail free headlines and news summaries to people who don't have time for the newspaper but carry BlackBerrys and other electronic gizmos.

In December, The Washington Post Co. bought online magazine Slate from Microsoft Corp. to increase the paper's Internet footprint.

"I could argue pretty forcefully that the free model and the non-newsprint model is what we're looking at in the future," said San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein. "Things are moving far quicker than we thought a few years ago" to new outlets besides ink-on-paper.

The San Francisco Chronicle is an example of the changeover underway: Its daily sales have dropped in recent years, but its Web site boasts more than 5 million unique visitors a month.

Anderson Cooper takes on Jeff Gannon

2005-02-19T19:11:00.000-05:00

Check it.

2nd best

2005-02-18T11:26:00.000-05:00

Freelance reporters for Homeland Security drill
Reporters wanted to participate in press component of Department of Homeland Security's TOPOFF 3 exercise for senior U.S. and local officials simulating a terrorist attack on the United States. Those selected will write copy for online news service reporting events within the exercise for an audience of exercise participants. This position will require seasoned reporters who can write quickly, using AP style, meeting tight deadlines, as if they were covering an actual incident for an actual online news service. Ideal candidates will be reporters with daily or wire experience who can write wire-style stories accurately, completely and quickly. You must NOT be currently employed by a real news organization and will be required to sign a nondisclosure agreement barring you from writing about this in the future.

best job listing ever

2005-02-17T14:13:00.000-05:00

Why bother with those meetings with Pulitzer jurors when you can answer this?

Reporters and journalist for Levi print ads
Looking for male and female reporters and journalists for Levi Jeans Print Ad. Shoot dates are March 3-6, 2005 at New York (will provide travel). MALE & FEMALE REPORTERS: ANY AGE AND ANY ETHNICITY. Real -looking, beautiful women with lean, good bodies, attractive, pretty, natural, approachable,and cool-looking. Real–looking men with good bodies, handsome, interesting, rugged. Lean bodies, not buffed. Must currently be a reporters and journalists. We WILL do a check to confirm.

"News industry advocates are urging passage of a proposed federal shield law..."

2005-02-17T00:42:00.000-05:00

In Wake of Plame Ruling, Federal Shield Law Seen as Best Hope
By Joe Strupp
Published: February 16, 2005 12:40 PM ET

NEW YORK As the fallout continues from a federal appeals court's rejection yesterday of two reporters' claims that they should avoid jail for refusing to reveal sources in the Valerie Plame case, news industry advocates are urging passage of a proposed federal shield law as the best way to counter such legal actions in the future. [it. added]

Hopes hang on two versions of such a law that were introduced earlier this month in the House and Senate. Each would provide protection similar to that of shield laws currently on the books in 31 states and the District of Columbia.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press yesterday called for a "coordinated effort" [see below] to support a federal shield law in the wake of the unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That ruling denied an appeal from Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, who were ordered jailed last fall for up to 18 months for refusing to disclose sources that leaked to them the identity of CIA Agent Valerie Plame. Lawyers for both plan to appeal, likely delaying any jail time for at least several weeks or months.

The ruling has heightened concerns about the need for a federal law in the wake of not just the Plame case but also several other federal investigations from Washington to San Francisco that have resulted in subpoenas or demands for sources from numerous reporters. While more than half the states have shield laws, none exist at the federal level.

"The decision in this case underscores that these are perilous times for journalists and the public's right to know," said Lucy Dalglish, the Reporters Committee executive director. "There are more than two dozen cases pending across the United States where journalists are being asked to operate as investigators for the government and litigants. The ability of the media to act as independent sources of information for the public is in jeopardy."

George Freeman, a New York Times attorney who has worked on the paper's defense of reporters in several cases, agreed that a federal law is imperative. "There is an inequity between the state and federal courts on this," Freeman told E&P today. "This would provide similar protection."

Two similar shield bills have been introduced in Congress in the past two weeks.

The first, H.R. 581, is co-sponsored by Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) and Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) and was introduced Feb. 2. The Senate version, S. 3440, is authored by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), who introduced it on Feb. 9. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) offered his own bill in late 2004, but has yet to introduce a new version for the current session.

"Reporters rely on the ability to assure confidentiality to sources in order to deliver news to the public, and the ability of news reporters to assure confidentiality to sources is fundamental to their ability to deliver news on highly contentious matters of broad public interest," Boucher said in a statement after introducing his bill. "Without the promise of confidentiality, many sources would not provide information to reporters and the public would suffer from the resulting lack of information."

Freeman said the bi-partisan sponsorship is a strong sign that the issue is not being treated as just a political battle. "We're heartened that we have support from both sides of the aisle," he said. "I think everyone in Washington realizes this is the way information gets to the public."

Still, even the strongest supporters realize that the chances of getting a bill passed this year and signed by President Bush, who has shown little support for press access and rights, is slim. But they realize that just debating the issue in congress can move such laws a step closer to reality.

Irwin Gratz, president of the Society of Professional Journalists and a producer at Maine Public Radio, agreed that the pending bills are important as a strong response to the federal court actions. "Clearly, it would help us in a lot of places where there is no protection," he told E&P. "Reporters are pretty naked on this issue. We presume to have a First Amendment protection, but we really don't have much of anything nationally."

Bob Steele, the Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values at the Poynter Institute, also supported such a law. But, he stressed that even a federal shield statute would not give blanket protection on confidential sources.

"It is one step and it is a less-than-perfect step," Steele said. "It would not be absolute. Journalists would still have to justify in some cases why the shield law applies."
Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.
--
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- Contact: Lucy Dalglish, (703) 807-2100

Reporters Committee calls for shield law passage in wake of today's D.C. Circuit decision

Feb. 15, 2005 - The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press called for a coordinated effort to support a federal shield law in the wake of the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia Circuit today that two prominent journalists do not have a privilege to keep sources of information from a federal grand jury.

"The decision in this case underscores that these are perilous times for journalists and the public's right to know," said Reporters Committee Executive Director Lucy Dalglish. "There are more than two dozen cases pending across the United States where journalists are being asked to operate as investigators for the government and litigants. The ability of the media to act as independent sources of information for the public is in jeopardy."

The shield bills current under consideration in Congress were introduced in early February by Reps. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) and Rick Boucher (D-Va.) in the House (H.R. 581), and by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) in the Senate (S. 3440). A similar bill was introduced late in the last congress by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), but no action was taken.

In today's action by the D.C. Circuit, the three-judge panel unanimously held that no privilege would protect Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller from being compelled to testify about their sources. The court held that the U.S. Supreme Court "unquestionably" answered the question about maintaining confidentiality before grand juries in 1972 in Branzburg v. Hayes.

This leak investigation began after undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity was published by columnist Robert Novak in a July 2003 column. Novak cited two unnamed "senior administration officials" as his sources.

Following the Novak column, several other journalists, including Cooper, reported receiving the same information. Miller did not report on the allegations, but was subpoenaed after her name apparently came up during the investigation as another journalist who had also heard the disclosure.

The leak has been characterized as a politically-motivated attack on Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, because Wilson publicly criticized the Bush administration's assertion that Iraq had been attempting to buy uranium from Niger to make nuclear weapons. The unnamed sources disclosed Plame's name to point out that Wilson, who had travelled to Africa for the CIA in order to investigate the uranium claims, was only chosen because his wife suggested him for the assignment.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed to investigate the leak last fall, which could lead to criminal charges if the leakers were aware that Plame was an undercover operative. Fitzgerald subpoenaed or otherwise demanded testimony from a number of journalists -- including Cooper, Miller, Tim Russert, host of NBC's "Meet the Press," and Walter Pincus and Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post -- before a grand jury concerning alleged conversations the reporters had with confidential sources. It is not known if Novak has been subpoenaed or if he has testified.

Miller received a subpoena to testify before the grand jury on Aug. 12. Cooper reached an agreement with prosecutors and testified about conversations with Libby on Aug. 24, but was then subpoenaed again Sept. 14. In October, Hogan held Miller and then Cooper in contempt, fined them $1,000 per day and ordered them to jail until they testify. The fines and sentences were stayed pending a consolidated appeal. The U.S. Court of Appeals (D.C. Cir) heard oral arguments on Dec. 8 and released its decision today.

More information about the federal shield bills and the grand jury investigation into the Plame matter is available from the Reporters Committee's Web site at: www.rcfp.org/shields_and_subpoenas.html
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Shafer: Fire Floyd

2005-02-16T15:36:00.000-05:00

Question 1. Should Miller and Cooper ditch the First Amendment defense?

Question 2. Does this really mean that a judicial remedy is unlikely, and the Bush administration knows that - which is why a legislative remedy is necessary?

Question 3. Will Dodd and Pence move their legislation in time to make a difference here, if not formally, than in the court of public opinion? (I find it unlikely.)
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press box
Memo to Cooper and Miller
Fire Floyd Abrams. Hire Bruce Sanford.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2005, at 3:55 PM PT

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit scuttled the appeals of Matthew Cooper and Judith Miller. Both reporters are contesting grand jury subpoenas to testify in the investigation of the leak of CIA covert agent Valerie Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak. Novak published Plame's identity in a July 2003 syndicated column.

Circuit Judges David B. Sentelle and David S. Tatel manhandled the defendants' attorney, First Amendment legend Floyd Abrams, during the Dec. 8 oral arguments before the appeals court, and today's decision only continues their thrashing. (Judge Karen L. Henderson asked only a couple of questions at argument and authored a brief concurrence today.) In the majority opinion, Judge Sentelle finds no merit in Abrams' assertion that a First Amendment privilege protects Cooper and Miller from the subpoena. Talk to the grand jury about your confidential sources or go to jail for contempt, he says to Cooper and Miller. Judge Tatel's nuanced and learned concurring opinion teasingly entertains the privilege notion before folding down the sheets on the two journalists' prison bunks and fluffing their pillows.

It's easy to blame Abrams for Cooper and Miller's predicament, especially now that some of the other journalists subpoenaed in the case, including Tim Russert, Glenn Kessler, and Walter Pincus, appear to have cut face-saving deals with the prosecutor to avoid jail. Maybe a First Amendment legend isn't what this case called for in the first place. Maybe Cooper and Miller would have been better served by having a criminal lawyer who knows how to bargain.

With New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. promising to appeal this decision, perhaps both Cooper and Miller might want to rethink the utility of hanging their whole case on this First Amendment defense. If I were running their defense committee, I'd give the case to Bruce W. Sanford.

Sanford, no First Amendment slouch, helped write the law that special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald is using to hunt Plame's leaker—the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. (Interest declared: More than 10 years ago, Sanford represented me. On a much later occasion he bought me a nice breakfast, which I'm sure he billed to his firm.)

Victoria Toensing, another framer of the 1982 Act, and Sanford wrote last month in a Washington Post op-ed, that it's "time for a timeout on a misguided and mechanical investigation in which there is serious doubt that a crime was even committed. Federal courts have stated that a reporter should not be subpoenaed when the testimony sought is remote from criminal conduct or when there is no compelling 'government interest,' i.e., no crime."

Citing their intimate knowledge of the 1982 legislation, Sanford and Toensing explain how they drafted a dart gun of a law, and not the blunderbuss Fitzgerald keeps firing into the bushes. The law as they conceived of it was so narrowly defined that it's been used in only one prosecution, back in 1985.

Sanford and Toensing line up the specifics of the law like Burma Shave signs:

The law wasn't designed for the prosecution of government employees who unintentionally or carelessly divulged a covert agent's identity.
The agent must truly be covert in the eyes of the 1982 Act (they doubt Plame was).
The disclosure must be intentional and backed by the knowledge that "affirmative measures" are being taken by the government to conceal the agent's identity. (Plame was working a desk job at the CIA's Langley headquarters at the time of Novak's column, not a very compelling cover. Also, the agency seems to have done none of its usual jawboning to dissuade Novak from divulging Plame's identity when he called.)

(I catalogued similar specifics in an October 2003 Slate column, "Stop the Investigation.")

What could Sanford do for Cooper and Miller that Abrams can't? For one thing, he could tack away from the First Amendment argument. Even though I'm a First Amendment extremist, I found Abrams' oral argument before the D.C. Circuit to be wishful and flabby. I don't know of any court, let alone the Supreme Court, that is likely to hold that reporters possess a near automatic right to ignore grand jury subpoenas.

If I'm right, a fresh law jockey might be the ticket. In their op-ed, Sanford and Toensing called upon the special prosecutor Fitzgerald and the two reporters to ask Judge Thomas Hogan, who oversees the grand jury, "to conduct a hearing to require the CIA to identify all affirmative measures it was taking to shield Plame's identity." They conclude their piece, "Before we even think about sending reporters to prison for doing their jobs, the court should determine that all the elements of a crime are present."

And if that strategy fails, Cooper and Miller should find the right guy to cut a face-saving deal with Fitzgerald. For all Fitzgerald's Javertian tendencies, I doubt if he wants to be remembered as the guy who jailed reporters from Time and the New York Times.

The last shot, of course, is the Supreme Court. But the Supremes don't have to take the case, and my guess is that they won't if it's argued on First Amendment grounds, preferring to let their Branzburg precedent stand.

Regardless of the specific legal theory on which they proceed, Miller and Cooper could do worse than coax an insanely bright legal argument out of the guy who helped write the law Fitzgerald is swinging like a meat hook.

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

Escalation: What Remedy, Judicial or Legislative?

2005-02-16T01:43:00.000-05:00

Note that the WH is speaking about a judical remedy when it says: "We'll leave it to the courts to address that matter," McClellan said.

Others, like Dodd, Lugar, Pence and Pinch are asking for a legislative remedy. This quote speaks for itself. But see this on Pence.
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"If the findings of this decision are upheld, they will also severely restrict all citizens’ ability to make fully informed electoral decisions. When you thoughtfully consider the innumerable ramifications of this decision, it becomes absolutely apparent that they are a direct threat to our newspaper, our Company, our profession and our democratic form of government. This is why we must individually and collectively urge our friends, family, colleagues and neighbors to write their members of Congress and support a federal shield law recently introduced by Senator Richard Lugar and Congressmen Mike Pence and Rick Boucher." - Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (emp. added.)
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Fed Court Rules Against Miller, Cooper - Floyd Protests

2005-02-15T13:52:00.000-05:00

UPDATE: PINCH RESPONDS
(thanks Gawker)
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To the Staff:

The United States Court of Appeals today decided that a New York Times reporter, Judy Miller, and a Time magazine reporter, Matthew Cooper, must disclose confidential sources to a grand jury investigating the leak of the name of a woman who works for the CIA or go to jail for up to 18 months.

As you know, Judy (and we believe Matthew, as well) will not do this. We support her fully in this decision and will now pursue all avenues of appeal, including asking the United States Supreme Court to review the case. The consequences of this landmark case are almost impossible t overestimate. When we consider the many complex issues that we face at home and abroad, it is hard to imagine a more inopportune moment to restrain the free flow of information. Given all that is at stake, we all need to know much more — not a lot less — about the major issues of the day.

While confidential sources and unattributed quotes are not our favorite part of the journalistic process, they are an important factor in how Washington and most of the rest of the world operate. Unless we are content with newspapers that are just reprints of press releases, official pronouncements and news conference transcripts, we must accept such sources as a way of life. The Times goes very far in trying to tell our readers why someone won’t speak on the record. But when individuals do speak to us confidentially, they do so knowing we will protect their identity.

If the findings of this decision are upheld, they will also severely restrict all citizens’ ability to make fully informed electoral decisions. When you thoughtfully consider the innumerable ramifications of this decision, it becomes absolutely apparent that they are a direct threat to our newspaper, our Company, our profession and our democratic form of government. This is why we must individually and collectively urge our friends, family, colleagues and neighbors to write their members of Congress and support a federal shield law recently introduced by Senator Richard Lugar and Congressmen Mike Pence and Rick Boucher.

We can take some solace and inspiration from the fact that we’ve been in this position before — in fact, quite a few times. The first for The Times was in 1857, when we published an editorial criticizing lobbying activity involving congressmen who were paid to support a piece of legislation. A congressional committee was established to probe the charges. Instead of pursuing our story, it sought out our reporter — a Mr. Simonton — and asked him to reveal his sources. Mr. Simonton, bless his heart, refused, was held in contempt by the House of Representatives and served 19 days. Mr. Simonton was finally released and the House members in question resigned when the full story became public.

In 1978 a New York Times reporter, Myron Farber, was ordered to jail, also for doing his job and refusing to give up confidential information. He served 40 days in a New Jersey prison cell. In response to this injustice, the New Jersey Legislature strengthened its shield law, which recognizes and serves to protect a journalist’s need to protect sources and information.

As we did in 1857, in 1978 and many times in between, we will stay true to our values. We have confidence that as the United States Supreme Court and the American public review the full details of the Judy Miller and Matthew Cooper case, the reporters? courageous decision to protect their confidential sources will be fully vindicated.

Arthur
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Well, here we go.....
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SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Tuesday, February 15, 2005 · Last updated 10:17 a.m. PT

Appeals court upholds ruling in CIA leak

By MARK SHERMAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

WASHINGTON -- A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a ruling against two reporters who could go to jail for refusing to divulge their sources to investigators probing the leak of an undercover CIA officer's name to the media.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with prosecutors in their attempt to compel Time magazine's Matthew Cooper and The New York Times' Judith Miller to testify before a federal grand jury about their confidential sources.

"We agree with the District Court that there is no First Amendment privilege protecting the information sought," Judge David B. Sentelle said in the ruling, which was unanimous.

Floyd Abrams, the lawyer for both reporters, said he would ask the full appeals court to reverse Tuesday's ruling. "Today's decision strikes a heavy blow against the public's right to be informed about its government," Abrams said in a statement.

In October, Judge Thomas F. Hogan held the reporters in contempt, rejecting their argument that the First Amendment shielded them from revealing their sources. Both reporters face up to 18 months in jail if they continue to refuse to cooperate.

The special prosecutor in the case, Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, is investigating whether a crime was committed when someone leaked the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame. Her name was published in a 2003 column by Robert Novak, who cited two senior Bush administration officials as his sources.

The column appeared after Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, wrote a newspaper opinion piece criticizing President Bush's claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger. The CIA had asked Wilson to check out the uranium claim. Wilson has said he believes his wife's name was leaked as retaliation for his critical comments.

Disclosure of an undercover intelligence officer's identity can be a federal crime if prosecutors can show the leak was intentional and the person who released that information knew of the officer's secret status.

Cooper is a White House correspondent for Time who has reported on the Plame controversy. He agreed in August to provide limited testimony about a conversation he had with Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, after Libby released Cooper from his promise of confidentiality.

Fitzgerald then issued a second, broader subpoena seeking the names of other sources.

Miller is facing jail for a story she never wrote. She had gathered material for an article about Plame, but ended up not doing a story.

Prosecutors have interviewed President Bush, Cheney, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and other current or former administration officials in the investigation. Journalists from NBC and The Washington Post also have been subpoenaed.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan declined Tuesday to comment on the appeals court ruling. "We'll leave it to the courts to address that matter," McClellan said.

"The president has made it clear that he wants to get to the bottom of this matter," he said, adding that Bush also has urged anyone with information on the case to come forward.

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On the Net:

U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit: http://www.cadc.uscourts.govinternetinternet.nsf
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My tough independent question is...

2005-02-14T17:49:00.000-05:00

White House Briefing - February 14, 2005

The following transcript of a recent White House "Press" briefing comes to our attention:

Spokesman: Good morning. A lot of admin stuff this morning. Copies of the President's schedule will be distributed this afternoon. Copies of the vice president's itinerary are on the table in the back. Various bogus news stories and fake news briefings will be available on the web for those on our payroll, just change the names as you see fit. It's all make-believe but please make it look good. W-2s are in the mail, scribes (Laughter). Now, questions? Bill?

Reporter: yes, Bill Jones here, a.k.a. Tom True, a.k.a. Rev. Wholey Rowler. My tough independent question is, Do you think that the President is even more handsome today than he was a week or ago? And, really, is there any end to how dashing and gallant he can be? Whatta hunk.

Spokesman: Thank you, that's a good point. The president strives to meet all his challenges with equanimity. He's a War President after all. And, Bill, your 1099 form is misplaced and accounting can't pay you without it. Can you work on that? Sarah?

Reporter: Sarah Fistooch or Melanie WangerBanger or Lynne Shiny of liberalsarescumandshouldbekilled.com here. How does the President get through day being soooooo right all the time and having to work with all those subhuman Democrats and those lying cheating bums, sex perverts and drug addicts?

Spokesman: Now, don't be so tough on Rush and Bill O'R. (Laughter) Seriously, Sarah, the War President understands this is a diverse world we live in full of both good people and the Spawn of Satan who are the Democrats as you so independently have written in your web page and its ancillary BushForBucks.com. Follow-up, Sarah?

Reporter: Sort of. Why do I have to pay taxes on my White House bribes and boodle in the District of Columbia when I live in Virginia? No child left behind. It is very annoying to get all these checks no child left behind and then see them whittled down by my having to actually pay taxes. No child left behind. I am quite rich, you know, I thought I didn't have to pay taxes.

Spokesman: Thanks, Sarah. We'll look into that. It is not this administration's policy that a rich person should ever pay taxes. That's what the poor are for. Hank?

Reporter: Aye. And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, In my dream, behold, I stood upon the bank of the river: And, behold, there came up out of the river seven kine, fatfleshed and well favoured; and they fed in a meadow: And, behold, seven other kine came up after them, poor and very ill favoured and leanfleshed, such as I never saw in all the land of Egypt for badness: And the lean and the ill favoured kine did eat up the first seven fat kine: And when they had eaten them up, it could not be known that they had eaten them; but they were still ill favoured, as at the beginning. So I awoke. And I saw in my dream, and, behold, seven ears came up in one stalk, full and good: And, behold, seven ears, withered, thin, and blasted with the east wind, sprung up after them: And the thin ears devoured the seven good ears: and I told this unto the magicians; but there was none that could declare it to me. How long will our Mighty President, May His name Be Glory, Wonderful, have to endure the blasphemous and sinful sight of yon perverts Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in their debauchery and poisonous relationship??? It is ye olde virtue for the President to lay a warm, wet kiss on Joe Lieberman but thunder & brimstone be on these cartoons!!!

Spokesman: The War President does not believe his kissing of Senator Lieberman, D-Iraq, conflicts too much with his opposition to same-sex sex. Incidentally, Reverend, we all love your new web pages, www.hornymaleministers.com and www.thelambshallliedownwiththelion(wink-wink).com. The checks in the mail. Next.

Reporter: Joe from Faux News Channel. Does this brilliant President ($1,000, please) plan to use -- having a little trouble reading this, you guys might get bigger type on these "questions" you give us to ask (Laughter) -- his great manly wisdom ($2,500, more) to respond to outcry from the heart of honest good clean America over the Weapons of Mass Destruction in the bankrupt, busted Social Security building ($3,000), the biological weapons and nuclear program there? ($7,500) Bleat bleat bleat.

Spokesman: Tough questions as always, Joe. (Laughter) The War President knows that the Social Security program is a hotbed of liberal al-Qaeda terrorists wanting to kill our babies in their cribs, as you would have asked if you had turned over the card and read them ALL, Joe. We'll be invading this outpost of tyranny soon. Next? Who's that back there. Haven't called on you for so long I've forgotten your name.

Reporter: Smith from the AP. Speaking of Iraq, the war has been going on for .... (Question drowned out by cries from the rent-a-reporter corps of "Commie," "Pinko rat," "Why don't you go back to your lover Saddam?," "Blue state wimp!" and the reporter from a legitimate newspaper was beaten and escorted from the building by the Secret Service) Spokesman: I don't know what's happening to the neighborhood, here, when we actually get press people in the press briefing. That'll be it for today. You're the best media corps money can buy. (Applause.)

Copyright 2005, Hartford Courant