No shield for the gotcha gamesters

I ONCE KNEW a reporter who went to jail for weeks for refusing to reveal his source. He didn’t get a million-dollar book deal out of it. His bosses didn’t take him out for a martini and a massage when he got sprung after 46 days in the slammer. He died at age 52, a regular old shoe-leather reporter. Because of what he did, Californians enshrined the reporter shield law in the state Constitution.

Bill Farr was working for the now-vanished Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in 1970, covering the Manson murder trial. His story was a lurid account of celebrity gore, about Manson’s supposed plots to flay Frank Sinatra alive, to slice off Richard Burton’s penis and gouge out Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes. Bill had received a document about it, and confirmed it with two of the many attorneys in the case, all of them under a gag order. It was a very big, very brief story.

Months later, after Bill had left newspapering, the judge jumped on him for not revealing who had broken the gag order. Now that Bill wasn’t a reporter, the reasoning went, he had no reporter’s protection. The Times hired him and fought for him, but finally into the clink he went. In January 1973, a federal judge ordered Bill released.

Bill was the first to admit that his story wasn’t the Pentagon Papers, not by a long shot. As he wrote later, “I have never claimed there was any great public good involved in the article I wrote ... but the principle of protecting sources is operative nonetheless.”

Now, with Judith Miller and the New York Times and the criminal snowball called Plamegate, the story has become as important as the principle. The reporter-source minuet is always a nuanced one. Miller, a maverick by her own paper’s accounts, agreed to a request from her source -- Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby -- that if she wrote a story using his information (which she never did), she would identify him as a “former [Capitol] Hill staffer” (in Washington that’s like saying “a former high school student”) rather than as the senior White House official he was and (depending on what the special prosecutor has in his briefcase) is.

Cui bono is what every reporter must ask about every source. Who benefits? Everyone who leaks and speaks has a reason. Some motives are honorable, some vindictive. Readers need to know as much as they can about even unnamed sources, to judge how solid or suspect that source’s information and motives may be. Miller’s promise could have allowed a White House official to exact political revenge without being sullied by it. On a story of that magnitude, no reporter should -- or should want to -- make that decision alone. It isn’t just the reporter’s reputation hanging out there -- it is the newspaper’s.

If all of this sounds to Americans beyond the Beltway like some peculiar, arcane ritual, it should -- because it is. D.C. is 68 square miles of parasites and hosts constantly changing places, inbred as the Habsburgs and as self-absorbed. Reporters can easily find themselves thinking that the only audience that matters is not their readers but the names in their Rolodexes.

Thirty years ago, reporters’ reputations as defenders of the little guy with a big story to tell were such that “Three Days of the Condor” ended with the hunted man, played by Robert Redford, going to the New York Times with the same confidence of protection that Quasimodo had when he swept Esmeralda up into Notre Dame Cathedral, crying “Sanctuary, sanctuary!”

It isn’t Washington’s gotcha gamesters who should get to hide behind reporters’ shields and take anonymous potshots at their enemies. The people who deserve that protection are the men and women who honorably blow the whistle on fraud and corruption and then find themselves threatened or fired. People such as the two Border Patrol agents who pointed out security weaknesses, the Medicare actuary who wanted to tell Congress how much the new prescription drug law would really cost, and the Army’s top contracting official, who criticized a huge, noncompetitive Halliburton contract.

Who knows? Maybe one day there will even be some fearful White House underling looking for a reporter who will stand up for him and make sure that he can put his lips together and blow.