Protect Public Interest, not Journalists' Self-Interest

The Guts of Tim Rutten today:

. . . . By the time the defense rested in the perjury trial of former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the verdict on an influential group of Washington journalists was clear. Despite all the feigned martyrdom, all the dangerous and wasteful litigation, all the hand-wringing over the public's right to know that preceded their appearance in the witness box, it now is certain that NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller and former Time Magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper happily allowed themselves to be made useful idiots by a White House set on punishing a prominent critic of the Iraq war.

Miller received support from journalists across the country when she resisted a federal grand jury's demand that she testify about how she came to know that the critic, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was married to CIA agent Valerie Plame. Her paper defended her right to protect her sources in litigation all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. As it turns out, what she was concealing was not a confidential source but her own connection to a powerful and calculating manipulator out to ruin another man's reputation. It was something of a low point in contemporary journalism when Libby's lawyers subpoenaed Times Managing Editor Jill Abramson to give testimony that called Miller's honesty into question.

Russert came off looking particularly bad when, under cross-examination, it emerged that he made a public show of resisting a grand jury demand that he testify about his conversation with Libby, while secretly providing information to the FBI. Maybe that's how sophisticated Washington journalists navigate "the system," but an ordinary person with no more than the sense of right and wrong that they learned at Mother's knee would call his conduct what it is: sleazy double-dealing.

The picture that emerges here is of a stratum of the Washington press corps less interested in the sort of journalistic privilege that serves the public interest than in the kind of privileged access that ensures prominent bylines and good airplay . . . . .

Journalists consumed with a self-interest so strong that it makes them the willing dupes of manipulative sources report what they're meant to report and not the information the public has a right to know. In the Libby case, for example, while all these high-powered correspondents were busily lapping up anonymous tidbits about Wilson's marital status, nobody connected the dots. The public was not told what it needed to know, which was that the White House was engaging in a furious campaign to discredit a critic of its rationale for war.

. . . . It was all of a piece with the cozy journalist-source relationships that made most of the serious news media's reporting in the months before we invaded Iraq all but useless. As Gilbert Cranberg, former editorial page editor of the Des Moines Register and Tribune, wrote recently in the Neiman Foundation's online newsletter:

The shortcomings of Iraq coverage were not an aberration. Similar failure is a recurrent problem in times of national stress. The press was shamefully silent, for instance, when American citizens were removed from their homes and incarcerated solely because of their ancestry during World War II. Many in the press were cowed during McCarthyism's heyday in the 1950s. Nor did the press dispute the case for the fact-challenged Gulf of Tonkin resolution that led to a greatly enlarged Vietnam War. The press response to the build-up to the Iraq war simply is the latest manifestation of an underlying and ongoing reluctance to dissent from authority and prevailing opinion when emotions run high, especially on matters of war and peace, when the country most needs a questioning, vigorous press.