Protect Your Sources

By Crispin Sartwell

I am the son, grandson, and great-grandson of reporters. And one thing I absorbed with my mother's milk: you never give up a source. Not nobody. Not nohow.

I never thought I'd see circumstances that would make me doubt this. But here they are: when the most powerful people in the world are trying to use you to destroy a political enemy. In the Valerie Plame case I believe that not only would I give up the source to a judge; I would hang the source as publicly as possible.

In this case, what is motivating the reporters to resist, it seems to me, is at least as plausibly their toadying to power as their defiance of it. They're worried that if they give up the source, no high official in the Bush administration will talk to them again.

They ought to be more worried that these folks *will* talk to them again, and seek to twist their publications to their own vicious purposes.

When Bush administration officials leaked - evidently to anyone who would listen - that the wife of former ambassador Joe Wilson was a covert CIA operative, they were conveying a single message: mess with us and we'll take you to hell. (Wilson had - with first-hand knowledge - accused the administration of relying on blatantly false evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq.) And it's a serious deal: in the wrong place at the wrong moment, being revealed as a spy can get you killed.

That sources must be protected is an important principle of a free press, because only that assurance allows people to tell the truth about, for example, their powerful superiors, without fearing reprisal.

But protection of sources is not the only important principle of a free press. No press is free when it's being manipulated to the purposes of the powerful, whom it should be questioning or investigating.

The story has often been connected to the vice president's office. And frankly, I'd look at the vice president's office as the source of the fog of disinformation revealed by Joe Wilson in the first place.

At any rate, if you consider yourself a representative of freedom or the First Amendment, you had better make sure not only that you can conduct a competent investigation, but that your investigation is not simply being run out of the office of the people you're investigating.

If protection of sources is essential for an independent press, then surely so is independence, and if your story is more or less written by Dick Cheney, then protecting its sources is a way merely to protect your dependence.

Protecting the source on a story like that is more like the action of a Pravda than a Washington Post or New York Times. Not only will we say whatever Yuri Andropov wants us to say, we won't tell anyone that it was Andropov who told us to say it.

To her credit, one of the reporters who is being held in contempt for not revealing the sources of the story - the New York Times's Judith Miller - never even published the story. No one should have published that story, not even Republican ideologue Robert Novak. But at least no one is unclear about his agenda or inclined to think he's objective.

Novak, no doubt, was only too happy to be used. The other news organizations involved are a different matter entirely. No reporter is obliged to protect someone who is attempting to manipulate her not only into helping commit a felony, but into destroying the independence of her voice and of her publication.