On jailing reporters: "Balance" without insight

Re Reporter Convicted for Refusing to Give Identity of a Source, by Pam Belluck, New York Times, November 19, 2004:

Here is yet another news story which gives readers "balance" -- presenting quotes from all sides -- while yielding zero insight into the merits of the issue.

The story concerns a familiar situation -- a reporter facing imprisonment on contempt charges for refusing to identify sources. Both readers' camps are nourished -- law-and-order types who feel authority should be respected and reporters should obey judges' rulings, and liberal idealists convinced that freedom of speech is always sacrosanct. Open-minded readers committed to neither camp go hungry.

The judge is quoted as saying, "The evidence is clear and overwhelming and undisputed [and] proves beyond a reasonable doubt that he is guilty of criminal contempt."

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of The Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press, also gets in her say:

Ms. Dalglish said [the reporter's] case - along with those involving a Central Intelligence Agency officer, Valerie Plame, and a government nuclear physicist, Wen Ho Lee - suggest that there is "an atmosphere where the government is keeping a lot more secrets, the courts are keeping a lot more secrets, and you've got whistleblowers and other people who are within the government seeing something going on who say 'You know, I really feel this information should get out.' ''

The reporter himself also appears, with the plaintive quote: "When I became a reporter 30 years ago, I never imagined that I would be put on trial and face the prospect of going to jail simply for doing my job."

But the open-minded reader cannot determine whether it's right and proper for the judge to send the reporter to jail.

Of course reporters should be protected from government prosecution when they expose information which is arguably beneficial to democratic debate or citizens' political insights. An obvious example of such information would be exposing the truth when the government is misleading the people. (Some cases involve conflicting principles like national security which must also be weighed.)

However, this Times article does not address the information value of the reporter's news report at all. The case involves a video obtained by the reporter showing a crooked politician collecting a payoff. As far as the reader can tell from the defective Times report, the situation may be that:

• an undercover FBI investigation into political corruption has been damaged by the broadcast of a video secretly taken by the FBI.

• the broadcast served no purpose other than to titillate idle TV viewers with the spectacle of a politician collecting illicit cash.

• the reporter obtained this "scoop" by paying money to a rogue agent who was not only compromising an FBI investigation but also breaking the law.

If this is the situation (and I'm not claiming it is), it's not Woodward and Bernstein breaking the Watergate scandal. In such circumstances, it would seem eminently reasonable for the judge to demand to know who provided the video, and jail the reporter if he refuses to answer.

America's national disease is partisanship -- not merely blindness to the other side's arguments, but refusal to even consider the arguments. It's the polar opposite of intelligence, but it's the state of public debate today and it's routinely encouraged by political leaders who caricature and vilify the other side.

The Times's publication of a news report like this, which yields only enough light to inflame those with pre-hardened views on the general issue of press freedom, rather than illumining the issue in terms of readers' shared interests in both an informed citizenry and in successful prosecutions of corrupt politicians, shows that the disease is also promoted by supposedly quality newspapers.

It should be noted that the Times institution is itself an interested party in this general issue. If jailing the reporter is the right thing to do in this case, then the Times would have a direct motive for the obscurity of its news report. (See also editorial, Contempt for a Free Press, New York Times, November 20, 2004.)

Related: Questionable Advocacy of Press Freedom