By David Carr
The New York Times
Sept. 25, 2006
Excerpt:
[...] Just up the road in San Francisco
in the same week, Judge Jeffrey S. White of United States District
Court ruled that Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, the two
reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle
who broke open the baseball steroid scandal, should receive more prison
time than any of the defendants in the Balco drug case for using secret
grand jury testimony in their reporting and refusing to divulge their
sources. (They are still free on appeal.) Never mind that they got an
attaboy from the president of the United States for helping baseball
right itself, the act of reporting has again been criminalized.
While the contemporary obsession with leaks and the willingness to go
to any lengths to plug them is widespread, the tone was set in
Washington. The current administration has responded to critical
stories, including two that won Pulitzer Prizes, by going after sources.
