Protect public interest, not journalists’ self-interest

THERE’S a story about a group of university professors gathered for drinks in the rooms of a distinguished Viennese colleague.

In the course of the evening, their talk turns to what each might want, if they could have anything in the world. Their wishes take a variety of forms, until finally the choice comes round to the host, who takes a long pull on his pipe and says, “Well, if I really could have anything I wanted, anything at all, I think I would choose ... permanent delusions of grandeur.”

Surveying the American news media and its treatment this week of events in courtrooms 3,000 miles apart, it’s difficult not to conclude that our news organizations have made a similar choice when it comes to weighing the implications of their ethical shortcomings in two wrenchingly controversial legal cases.

By the time the defense rested in the perjury trial of former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the verdict on an influential group of Washington journalists was clear. Despite all the feigned martyrdom, all the dangerous and wasteful litigation, all the hand-wringing over the public’s right to know that preceded their appearance in the witness box, it now is certain that NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller and former Time Magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper happily allowed themselves to be made useful idiots by a White House set on punishing a prominent critic of the Iraq war.

Miller received support from journalists across the country when she resisted a federal grand jury’s demand that she testify about how she came to know that the critic, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was married to CIA agent Valerie Plame. Her paper defended her right to protect her sources in litigation all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. As it turns out, what she was concealing was not a confidential source but her own connection to a powerful and calculating manipulator out to ruin another man’s reputation. It was something of a low point in contemporary journalism when Libby’s lawyers subpoenaed Times Managing Editor Jill Abramson to give testimony that called Miller’s honesty into question.

Russert came off looking particularly bad when, under cross-examination, it emerged that he made a public show of resisting a grand jury demand that he testify about his conversation with Libby, while secretly providing information to the FBI. Maybe that’s how sophisticated Washington journalists navigate “the system,” but an ordinary person with no more than the sense of right and wrong that they learned at Mother’s knee would call his conduct what it is: sleazy double-dealing.

The picture that emerges here is of a stratum of the Washington press corps less interested in the sort of journalistic privilege that serves the public interest than in the kind of privileged access that ensures prominent bylines and good airplay.

It would be somehow comforting to believe this was a localized infection, peculiar to the journalistic hothouse that is the nation’s capital. But the latest turn in the long-running saga of the Bay Area’s BALCO lab, which provided performance-enhancing drugs to leading athletes, shows otherwise. Two San Francisco Chronicle reporters -- Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams -- have made themselves poster children for advocates of a federal shield law by risking jail to protect the source who leaked them federal grand jury testimony by three professional baseball stars, including Barry Bonds.

Thursday, we learned just who they were protecting when Troy L. Ellerman, a defense lawyer for one of BALCO’s vice presidents, pleaded guilty to contempt of court, obstruction of justice and filing a false declaration with a federal court. Ellerman leaked the testimony to the Chronicle reporters, then went out and argued that the ensuing publicity would deny his client a fair trial. Worse, he actually filed motions with the court alleging that prosecutors had leaked the testimony and that charges against the BALCO official should be dismissed.

The two reporters maintained their silence while all this occurred. Worse, Fainaru-Wada returned to the defense attorney’s office to obtain still more leaked testimony after their source had lied in public and to the court.

To assert any form of journalistic privilege in a situation like that is something far worse than moral obtuseness. Conspiring with somebody you know is actively perverting the administration of justice to your mutual advantage is a betrayal of the public interest whose protection is the only basis on which journalistic privilege of any sort has a right to assert itself. Maybe this is how sophisticated investigative reporters navigate the ambiguities of “source management,” but an ordinary person with no more than the sense of right and wrong that they learned at Mother’s knee would call this conduct what it is: sleazy and contemptible.

There’s more at stake here than just an abstract preoccupation with journalistic ethics or the trade-school mechanics of handling sourcing in news stories. Journalists consumed with a self-interest so strong that it makes them the willing dupes of manipulative sources report what they’re meant to report and not the information the public has a right to know. In the Libby case, for example, while all these high-powered correspondents were busily lapping up anonymous tidbits about Wilson’s marital status, nobody connected the dots. The public was not told what it needed to know, which was that the White House was engaging in a furious campaign to discredit a critic of its rationale for war.

It was all of a piece with the cozy journalist-source relationships that made most of the serious news media’s reporting in the months before we invaded Iraq all but useless. As Gilbert Cranberg, former editorial page editor of the Des Moines Register and Tribune, wrote recently in the Neiman Foundation’s online newsletter: “The shortcomings of Iraq coverage were not an aberration. Similar failure is a recurrent problem in times of national stress. The press was shamefully silent, for instance, when American citizens were removed from their homes and incarcerated solely because of their ancestry during World War II. Many in the press were cowed during McCarthyism’s heyday in the 1950s. Nor did the press dispute the case for the fact-challenged Gulf of Tonkin resolution that led to a greatly enlarged Vietnam War. The press response to the build-up to the Iraq war simply is the latest manifestation of an underlying and ongoing reluctance to dissent from authority and prevailing opinion when emotions run high, especially on matters of war and peace, when the country most needs a questioning, vigorous press.”

Measured against that sort of failure, both the Libby trial and BALCO case can be seen as the indictment of the kind of journalism that asserts the right to protect its sources, to protect the public interest, but to conceal its own self-interested shortcomings.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com