By Edward Wasserman
The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee
Feb. 21, 2007
Excerpt:
To be sure, honoring confidentiality agreements is not a duty of
such transcendent importance that it must be served at all costs.
Other
obligations may matter more. I'd say exposing a deceitful, high-level
campaign to panic this country into war and crush dissent would qualify.
But
that's not the Libby trial. And submitting to a petulant prosecutor
who's annoyed by the evasions of a second-tier courtier hardly warrants
abandoning a cornerstone of press independence.
What happened is that these journalistic heavyweights -- and their employers -- just didn't have the stomach for a fight.
Meanwhile,
bantam-weight blogger Josh Wolf languishes in jail to protect some
ordinary people and a principle: That reporters have to be able to
assure people that they're independent, that they'll stand up to
bullying, that they won't be dragooned as helpmates to police,
prosecutors or grand juries.
The cruelest irony is that Wolf's
tormentors deny he's a journalist at all. To me, if he's independently
gathering publicly significant information for the purpose of making it
widely known, he's a journalist.
The question is what we call the songbirds at the Libby trial.
