NYT reporter Judith Miller thinks her "job" is to defy the law
Beldar blog
My commenters gently but justifiably mock me for so often expressing astonishment over the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media. But despite my best efforts to lower my expectations, I continue to find myself astonished on a regular basis. Today's jaw-dropper (boldface added):
"I think it's really frightening when journalists can be put in jail for doing their job effectively," [New York Times' reporter Judith] Miller told reporters outside the courthouse.
Okay, let's go ahead and dress Ms. Miller in the radiant white silk robes of a High Priestess of the Mainstream Media. We can extinguish all the ambient lighting — her righteous glow illuminates the courthouse steps beyond the poor power of technology to supplement. "Do you know who I work for?" she might as well have said, "And don't you understand that as a High Priestess of the Mainstream Media, my job is to flout the lawful orders of the United States District Courts?"
What says the fellow inside the building, the one in the cotton-polyester black robe, holding a gavel under the regular GSA-issue fluorescent lights?
A federal judge held a reporter in contempt Thursday for refusing to divulge confidential sources to prosecutors investigating the leak of an undercover CIA officer's identity.
U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan ordered New York Times reporter Judith Miller jailed until she agrees to testify about her sources before a grand jury, but said she could remain free while pursuing an appeal. Miller could be jailed up to 18 months.
Hogan cited Supreme Court rulings that reporters do not have absolute First Amendment protection from testifying about confidential sources. He said there was ample evidence that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of Chicago, the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case, had exhausted other avenues of obtaining key testimony before issuing subpoenas to Miller and other reporters.
"The special counsel has made a limited, deferential approach to the press in this matter," Hogan said.
Fitzgerald is investigating whether a crime was committed when someone leaked the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, whose name was published by syndicated columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. Novak cited two "senior administration officials" as his sources.
I'm quite sure that when Ms. Miller's and the NYT's superb counsel, Floyd Abrams, appears before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to seek the appellate review that Judge Hogan very graciously permitted him to undertake with his client still outside bars, he'll find a more diplomatic way to put things. He'll talk about the First Amendment and freedom of the press; he'll talk about the important role of the press in a constitutional democracy, and why the press should be given a high degree of protection from prosecutorial subpoenas designed to uncover criminals. The D.C. Circuit will write a short per curiam opinion, perhaps praising Mr. Abrams' efforts and acknowledging his clients' misguided sincerity, and will re-affirm that the press has indeed gotten all of the extraordinary deference to its insistence on protecting "confidential sources" that controlling Supreme Court precedent permits.
And then — barring a change of heart on her part — they'll put Ms. Miller into jail.
Ms. Miller will not be in jail for "doing her job effectively." In fact, as Mr. Abrams noted in trying to mitigate her punishment, and Judge Hogan acknowledged, Ms. Miller actually never wrote a story based on whatever her confidential source or sources told her. She's a reporter who didn't report.
No, Ms. Miller will be in jail for contempt of court for intentionally, knowingly, and above all willfully disobeying a lawful court order — and do not her words from the courthouse steps positively drip with contempt for the court, and the law, and the notion that she and the NYT are subservient to it? Ms. Miller will richly deserve her jail time, and I will have utterly no sympathy for her. They should hang a sign outside the door of her cell, in fact: "Martyr without a clue." |
