All Leaks Are Created Equal

by digby

This essay in today’s LA Times makes my head hurt. It’s by a professor of media studies and history at Rutgers and it is called “Attack secrets, not leaks:”

As a critic of both the Iraq war and the administration’s political ruthlessness, I appreciate the satisfaction of seeing a White House operative nabbed for what seems like petty revenge. As a former and still-occasional journalist, I agree with the criticisms of Miller’s credulous prewar reporting, which helped legitimize claims that Saddam Hussein posed a danger to the United States. As a former assistant (and still a friend) to Woodward, I’ve often heard the rap that he’s too close to those in power.

However, I also believe that the frame that the news media have used for presenting this story is badly warped.

Instead of dwelling on horse-race details about who leaked what to whom and when, pundits should be debating the fundamental issue: Should leaking be criminalized in the first place? Instead of cheering the Plame investigation and vilifying the reporters caught in its web, we should be deploring the probe and applauding the reporters for gaining access to classified material, however ugly the leakers’ motives.

I understand this principle. If you “criminalize” leaks then people will stop leaking and the public will be less informed. But that principle exists to serve the far more important principle of the public’s right to know. That is what has become badly warped.

Why in the world should we applaud reporters for getting access to classified material but not writing a story about the powerful government leakers who leaked that classified information in order to obscure the facts and hide the truth? I’m not crying for Plame (although I think it’s a traitorous act to cavalierly expose a WMD specialist for petty reasons at a time like this.) What I’m interested in is the fact that the executive branch used classified information to secretly discredit a critic and the press doesn’t understand that withholding that story, not the identities of those who did it, is outrageous and worthy of condemnation.

The Fitzgerald probe is a peculiarity that is merely shining a light on a common practice among insiders that they clearly don’t understand is wrong. In the case of both Miller and Woodward, they wrote nothing about the case until they were forced by the law and their lameass, tardy editors. Their protection of their sources actually superceded their larger obligation to inform the public. This happened throughout this saga to greater and lesser degress, wherein a number of reporters gave lawyerly answers and talked about the case as if they didn’t know the answers to the questions they were asking, acting the part of journalist instead of actually being journalists. As I wrote earlier, as far as I can tell, Matt Cooper (and I should add, Knut Royce and Tim Phelps) were the only ones who actually understood what the story was.

Nobody is saying that they should have revealed the names of their sources, but they damned well should have revealed the substance of their conversations with those sources. Moreover they should have revealed to the public that the administration was using underhanded methods to discredit a critic. The fact Woodward and Miller (and others) wrote no stories is not a reason to excuse them — it’s the main reason to condemn them.

We hear a lot of whining about how they didn’t write stories because they didn’t want to be subpoenaed or the prosecutor asked them not to say anything (which is a genuinely baffling genuflect to government power.) I feel their pain, but that is the chance they take when they traffic in classified information. Their job is a risky business and while I’m sure they hope they aren’t going to have to face a prosecutor for it, it’s always got to be in the back of their mind that it could happen. The government tries to keep secrets and the press tries to dig them out.

Surely, everyone can see where that breaks down in this story, right? The idea that the “ugly motives” of government officials is irrelevant is preposterous in this case. The first question should have been, why is the powerful Scooter telling me this on backround? Why isn’t the president’s right hand man Rove saying this on the record? Would George Bush fire them if he knew they were revealing this information? If it’s relevant to Wilson’s report and casts doubt on his credibility, why aren’t they saying this publicly?

There are only two possible reasons that Libby, Rove and the other leakers would not go on the record. The first is that they knew Plame’s status was classified. The second is that they were trying to smear Wilson and didn’t want the public to know that. Either way, reporters should have understood they were being used by powerful forces to obscure the truth, not reveal it.

There is no legitimate reason for a top administration official to anonymously leak classified information to support the administration’s position. You can see a case in which a top official would legitimately leak classified information to cast doubt on the administration’s policy with which he disagrees, but not the other way around. The executive branch classifies information in the first place, presumably because it’s not supposed to be public. If they feel that the information is important and necessary to make public in order to support their policy, they can declassify it, call a press conference, give an interview, write a paper. Or they can shut up and find another way to advance their position. What they shouldn’t be able to do is have it both ways — use classified information to wage turf wars or discredit administration critics by having the press cover their asses. And yet that’s what happened. Top members of the Bush administration know they can get away with this because they believe that the chumps in the press will even go to jail rather than reveal their dirty deeds (which they went to great pains to remind the press to do.) That is “up is downism” taken to an extreme.

I agree that it’s not the job of the journalist to worry about the legal ramifications for Rove and Libby. Reporters are in the business of reporting classified information if it is in the public interest. (See: Pentagon Papers) However, reporters are not supposed to be in the business of advancing the administration’s position through this means. That is an abuse of confidentiality. The highest level of government has both the power and the responsibility to debate its critics openly and honestly. If they refuse to do that, the press shouldn’t do it for them behind a shield of anonymity. It subverts democracy.

Rove and Libby (and the others) may not have anonymously leaked because they knew Plame’s status was classified. It is just as likely that they did it for the same reason they always do — they were playing dirty pool and didn’t want to attach their names to it. This is what all these jaded members of the beltway refer to as “hardball politics.” And like hundreds of examples before this, the press docilely went along in order to preserve its access.

The reporter’s privilege is a means to an end, not the end in itself. It exists to serve the public’s right to know. And yet in this case, as in so many others in recent years, it’s been used to obscure the truth, spin the facts, serve the powerful to the detriment of the public.

To pretend that motives don’t matter, that all sources are equal, that it doesn’t matter if a source lies or uses the reporter as a cover for unethical behavior, is to devalue the principle until it has no meaning. Apparently, many of the elite media are so “entangled” with their sources and so inured to dirty politics that they can’t see this.

For the press to shield immensely powerful individuals from being responsible for these actions stands the entire principle underlying the reporter’s grant of confidentiality on its head. The point of it is to allow people to criticize their government without fear of professional reprisals, not so that powerful government officials can discredit their critics without fear of public reprisals.

.