Reportage Medialog

There has been some angry reaction to Arianna Huffington’s speculations about Judith Miller’s motives, that I quoted in my last entry. Richard Cohen in the Washington Post thinks it’s “ugly”:

The fury at Miller is ugly and does journalism no good. Whatever her politics, whatever her journalistic sins (if any), whatever the whatevers, she is in jail officially for keeping her pledge not to reveal the identity of a confidential source. (If that’s not the case, then we don’t know otherwise.) That pledge is no different than the one Bob Woodward made to Mark (Deep Throat) Felt.

While Huffington’s column was pure speculation (a reasonable activity for a columnist) it did attempt to do something that Cohen in his cheerleading does not do. Those, who like Cohen, want to beatify St Judith as the patron saint of confidential sources are making the same mistake that Miller herself made in her disastrous WMD reporting: they are not paying enough attention to motive.

If Miller is as good a journalist as her supporters are making out then she would never have been tricked into believing Amhed Chalabi’s furfies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons stash, she would have asked the simple questions about Chalabi’s motives and reliability as a source.

Those who speculate that there is more to the Miller case than meets the eye are only using their well honed journalistic instincts because the bare facts as they stand do not make sense. Every other journalist called upon by the special prosecutor has found a way - an ethical way - around jail time. Rove and numerous other White House sources have come forward, so she can’t be protecting them - and why would she protect a political source who was trying to use her to manipulate public opinion anyway? Unless of course she was more complicit in that manipulation than she cares to admit.

The reality is that no matter what facts finally emerge it seems that Miller’s pledge is indeed very different from “the one Bob Woodward made to Mark (Deep Throat) Felt.” This is necessarily so because the world of politics and the world of journalism has changed so markedly that the simplicity of the old codes no longer seem to work in such a straightforward manner.

It seems that the American Society of Journalists and Authors has thought more carefully about the Miller case than Cohen. The board of the organisation decided to reject the recommendation of their First Amendment Committee that Miller be given a Conscience in Media award. According to Editor and Publisher the decision was made because the board felt that “Miller’s career, taken as a whole, did not make her the best candidate for the award” and because of “divided opinions on the board over whether her recent actions merit the award.”

The earlier vote by the First Amendment committee had been narrowly in favor of giving Miller the award and was not made without internal controversy. One member Anita Bartholomew resigned in protest, writing in her letter of resignation:

“The First Amendment is designed to prevent government interference with a free press. Miller, by shielding a government official or officials who attempted to use the press to retaliate against a whistleblower, and scare off other would-be whistleblowers, has allied herself with government interference with, and censorship of, whistleblowers. When your source IS the government, and the government is attempting to use you to target a whistleblower, the notion of shielding a source must be reconsidered. To apply standard practices regarding sources to hiding wrongdoing at the highest levels of government perverts the intent of the First Amendment.”