We stand with reporter Judith Miller

Editor's Notes

Some people are having a tough time with the Judith Miller case. They lament that this confrontation between the press and government isn’t anything like the last big fight, the one in 1971 to publish the Pentagon Papers.

Regrettably, they’re right; this case involves what could turn out to be a political hack manipulating the media and putting a CIA agent in danger — which is a federal crime.

But who is in jail? The journalist who didn’t even write a story. And something’s terribly wrong with that picture.

To give you some background: A former CIA consultant criticized the Bush administration, and, presumably, one or more high-ranking government officials tried to discredit him by telling journalists that his wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative. A syndicated columnist and a Time magazine reporter wrote the story about the outing of the CIA agent, and a federal grand jury investigating the case demanded the identity of the sources.

Columnist Robert Novak must have coughed up the information, because he wasn’t held in contempt of court, as were Time’s Matthew Cooper and New York Times correspondent Judith Miller, the two other reporters who had received the leak. After a federal judge ordered them to testify, an appeals court affirmed the order, and the Supreme Court let it stand.

Time Inc. then handed over its reporter’s documents to a special prosecutor, and Cooper agreed to testify. Then on Wednesday, Miller, who had promised not to reveal her source, and kept her promise, went to jail.

Journalists are supposed to be watchdogs of government, trained to bare our teeth at anyone who would take away our legal rights and abilities to keep the public fully informed. Unfortunately, on the federal level, we don’t have complete protection, as Miller’s incarceration sadly shows.

Sure, we’ve had more than a few journalists who have abused their privileges and humiliated the rest of us. But we have to ask, as Miller did, “Do you want to hear from authorized government spokesmen, authorized corporate spokesmen alone, or do you want to hear what’s really going on inside an organization?”

In Tracy, we rarely write stories using confidential sources, and we’ve only twice had to fight to keep our reporters from turning into investigators for the government by being forced to give up their notebooks or provide witness statements. But it happens often in Washington, especially with administrations determined to operate in secrecy and federal prosecutors who find themselves threatened more by those who wield pens and notebooks than by what could happen to our democracy without them.

Judith Miller made a personal choice of conscience in defense of the First Amendment and its principles. She stood her ground, and for that, I stand in awe.