FAIR Calls for Revealing Sources in Plame, Lee Cases

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FAIR-L
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and activism

http://www.fair.org/press-releases/plame-lee.html

MEDIA ADVISORY:
FAIR Calls for Revealing Sources in Plame, Lee Cases
Courts should respect anonymity of genuine whistle-blowers

August 19, 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 prosecutors' attempts to discover these sources is
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.

Some have presented these cases as government assaults against the freedom
of the press. "Journalists should not have to face the prospect of
imprisonment for doing nothing more than aggressively seeking to report on
the government's actions," declared Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of
the New York Times (8/13/04), whose reporters have been subpoenaed in both
cases. But in neither case were reporters reporting on governmental
activities; rather, they were taking part in a governmental activity,
namely the selective and illegitimate revelation of information to damage
an individual.

Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for a Free Press told AP
(8/18/04): "All this has to do with secrecy. The government is trying to
keep more and more secrets all the time, and journalists are working
harder to uncover those secrets." Dalglish misses the larger context,
which is that the government's misuse of the power of information involves
both concealing and revealing information as it suits its purposes.

The reporters who revealed protected information about Wen Ho Lee were not
exposing government secrets, but violating an individual's privacy. And
the journalists who are protecting the identity of the officials who outed
Valerie Plame are actually participating in a cover-up of official
wrongdoing.

The motive and effect of government leaks are the critical questions, and
courts can and should make a distinction between legitimate whistleblowing
and illegitimate governmental attempts to use information as a weapon. If
Valerie Plame's name had been leaked to expose an illegal covert
operation, it would be an entirely different matter and should be treated
as such by the legal system. The First Amendment exists so that the press
can be a check on government abuse of power, not a handmaiden to it.