Fitz of Regret

In the headier days of 2004, internet Dems crowed gleefully when Patrick Fitzgerald tossed Times reporter Judy Miller in the klink for refusing to reveal sources that may or may not have given her information that she never in fact put into print. Miller had been a reliable propagandist for the pro-war line during the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq--she was notably a mark of that con man extraordinaire, Ahmed Chalabi. Digby, the popular Democratic partisan who runs the blog Hullaballoo, and the folks at FireDogLake were especially vocal on the justness of all this. Because they and their buddies judged that Miller was no journalist, and because they found Miller ideologically offensive, and, most of all, because they thought this time they were really going to get Bush in his own little Watergate, they loudly made the case that when it came to "national security," when it came to the "outing" of a CIA agent, the traditional, unwritten immunities that we confer on writers and journalists so that they can pursue and reveal the government's secrets with some modest protection from reprisal did not apply. They made a qualitative judgment about Miller's reporting--one with which I largely agreed, to be fair--and then decided that since she wasn't a "real" journalist, she was an Administration stooge. Patrick Fitzgerald was on the side of the angels, and anyone who suggested that it was bad precedent to toss a reporter in jail for protecting her sources, no matter how venal the reporter or degraded the sources, was inherently on the side of Bush, the warmongers, the Neocons, and the rest of the infinite gang of bogeymen who haunt Progressive dreams.

It was shameless and deeply unethical. Most people in most professions are pretty lousy at what they do, reporters included. But principles ought not be mere exigencies, and the speed with which Democratic partisans abandoned defense of a free and unfettered press in order to pursue a political hit job shocked even me--the frequent guests of this site know how gleefully unshockable I usually am when it comes to Democratic-Progressive perfidy. The next time you read a prog-blogger lamenting the way "the administration" has abandoned some principle--about privacy, about torture--in order to pursue some slapdash end, search their archives for a glowing defense of imprisoning people without trial in order to force them to reveal their private sources of information within the government.

Most papers are mostly infotainment, media arms of vast conglomerates that exist to sell print advertising and provide brand prestige. Most reporters are PR reps for the corporate economy and the imperial state. That doesn't obviate the necessity of protecting journalists from government retribution when every once in a while one of them produces the Pentagon Papers. I am by no means sanguine about the efficacy of the so-called Fourth Estate at guarding our liberties. If anything, I am a pessimist. But our default position should always be on the side of an increase in the rights and protections for autonomous individuals--and for whistleblowers, reporters, revealers, reactionaries. To throw over our principles and embrace limits on speech because you think that Judith Miller is a conservative and a slut is tawdry and despicable.

Now we see the thrown-over principle in action, as the government moves against a writer who reveals the incompetency, viciousness, and fraud at the heart of our so-called Intelligence Community. If James Risen can't avoid his Grand Jury subpoena and must appear before it, and if he refuses to reveal his sources within the government and CIA, will Progressives support jailing him? Or will they recant and claim he has a right to protect them because, after all, they agree with his reporting?