c.i. sent me a thing from fair. it's from august of 2004:
FAIR, the national media watch group, encourages the reporters and news outlets who have been asked to reveal their sources in the Valerie Plame and Wen Ho Lee cases to cooperate with investigators. Protecting the identities of confidential sources is a journalistic right that should be recognized by the courts, but only when it protects genuine whistle-blowers, not when it shields government wrongdoing. Plame is the covert CIA officer whose identity was apparently leaked after her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, charged the Bush administration with misuse of intelligence. Lee was a scientist falsely charged by the Clinton administration with being a Chinese spy, and officials seem to have leaked selective information about him in an effort to discredit him in the press.
Reporters in both cases are being told by investigators to reveal the specific members of the government who transmitted information. FAIR believes that attorneys' attempts to discover these sources are legitimate, and the ethical journalistic choice is to assist their efforts.The ability to protect confidential sources who reveal government wrongdoing is an important journalistic protection that deserves judicial respect. In both the Plame and Lee cases, however, the journalist's sources were not revealing government wrongdoing, but committing government wrongdoing . In both cases, the alleged crime was the act of revealing protected information to journalists in order to harm the government's enemies. Given that the alleged criminal acts apparently involved oral conversations between government officials and journalists, it is likely that no evidence of these purported acts would exist except for the journalists' potential testimony.
Unless one believes that the government ought to be able to surreptitiously use its enormous information-gathering powers to attack opponents with impunity, investigators must have the ability to ask journalists for their sources in such cases, and to compel them if necessary.
my feelings on the thing are neutral in terms of does judy go to jail or not. i honestly have more pressing things going on in my life and the new york times hasn't made it a 1st amendment case to my satisfaction (or really at all -- they did have one article that c.i. pointed out - i think it was monday).
but c.i. thought i might find something there that would be interesting. i love fair as much c.i. does. and i think they are making a good point above.
is this a case where the leaker was leaking something to help the public? no. it's not that kind of case. valerie plame was outed. not to save the public money, not because she was running some program that was turning the public into test subjects. there was no real reason to reveal her.
and what we're left with was people who had information didn't keep it public.
i'm really neutrel on this. i see fair's point and think they make it beautifully. i'm not sure i see the new york times' case because they've done such a god awful job making the point.
tomorrow the case is heard and judy miller will say she's not talking.
omg, i've got this shooting pain in the side of my head. seriously. it's like a twitch of pain. o.k. it's gone. that was weird.
so judy miller will say she's not talking.
i think fair has a point. i think the paper could make a point. i'm not seeing that they have.
i'm still neutral. i'm glad c.i. brought this to my attention and hopefully it will help some 1 who comes here. and i think fair's a great resource but i'm just not seeing this case as earth shattering. the paper's failed to do the basic work they should have been doing. that's their problem. tomorrow it becomes miller's.
maybe her attornies and she herself know how to fight better than the new york timid?
guess we'll see tomorrow.
what i want to weigh in today on is that ava and c.i. are hilarious and i know it was a pain in the ass for them to do the review saturday/sunday but it is hilarious and i cannot believe that they still can't see that. if you haven't read it, go read it. they send up everything and it's hilarious and has a message. i also will mention that sherry thinks 'operation enduring falsehood' is 1 of the best terms that c.i. alone or with ava has ever come up with. i agree it's a great tag and i'll start using it here:
The character he's playing is infamous not just for "Bring it on" but also for the "brave" sacrifice of giving up sweets when Operation Enduring Falsehood began. Judging by the size of the Bully's gut during the 2004 campaign, that's just one more promise he broke.
read the review!
