CRS* Disease
by digby
In the spring of ’04, responding to to Karl Rove’s lawyer Robert Luskin saying out of the blue over drinks one night, “Karl doesn’t have a Cooper problem. He was not a source for Matt,” Viveca Novak just happened to let it slip that it was all over TIME magazine that Karl Rove was the leaker. Luskin said “thank you. This is important.”
She didn’t tell her editors or the public during the entire time a first amendment challenge was being waged against her magazine all the way to the Supreme Court. She said nothing as her colleague Cooper faced jail time up until the last possible moment, not even when Rove’s lawyer essentially AGAIN, more than a year after she told him otherwise, said those magic words — this time to the Wall Street Journal (“If Matt Cooper’s going to jail, it’s not for Karl Rove.”)
She didn’t tell her editors or the public when Luskin informed her that she was going to be called by the prosecutor nor did she tell them when she hired a lawyer and gave the prosecutor a statement. It was only when she was actually called to give a deposition under oath that she decided that she needed to reveal that Luskin had proferred her as Rove’s alibi.
She made no notes of her numerous conversations with Luskin even though she claims that she was working on the Rove story. And she can’t remember when the conversations specifically took place. Apparently, she didn’t think it was important to make a note of it, even though she was allegedly working on the story at the time.
She wishes she could have a do-over. She says she would do it differently. Like, for instance, she wouldn’t go around revealing Matt Cooper’s sources. Cuz, it’s like mortifying. Totally.
Most amazingly, after she had already talked to the prosecutor for the first time and still not told her editors of her own involvement (or had told them that day) she wrote her story about about Bob Woodward:
But he said nothing then or in the months that followed as Fitzgerald launched his investigation and all Washington was consumed by a debate over spies and secrets and sources. Woodward kept what he knew secret even from Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. But as the case heated up this fall and Woodward joined in the reporting, “I learned something more” about the leak, he told TIME, which prompted him to finally tell Downie of his 2003 conversation.
[…]
Challenged on his public statements as well as his private conduct, Woodward explained that he had “hunkered down” out of fear of being subpoenaed at a time when reporters like Miller and TIME’s Matthew Cooper were being jailed or threatened with jail unless they revealed their sources. Elsewhere in the newsroom, Post colleagues were none too happy. On an internal chat board, columnist Jonathan Yardley argued that “this is the logical and perhaps inevitable outcome when an institution permits an individual to become larger than the institution itself.”
I can guess what the internal TIME chat board will be saying tomorrow: “Oh, and fuck you very much Viv. Your glass house needs cleaning.”
She continued:
It was a rough week all around. The White House confronted another twist that could only prolong a politically damaging case. Fitzgerald confirmed that he would be presenting evidence to a new grand jury. Other possible targets had to be worried that there is still an aggressive investigation going on with the possibility of further indictments to come. And Fitzgerald, a tireless prosecutor with a reputation for thoroughness, had to wonder, after two years and millions of dollars and countless hours of hunting, what else is out there that he missed.
Yes, Fitzgerald was being uncharacteristically sloppy. Clearly, he should have rendered the entire press corps to Gitmo and injected them with sodium pentathol. After all, nobody in Washington takes any notes or has any conscious memory of any conversations they ever have, so there really isn’t any other way to get the facts.
Truthfully, I suspect that Fitzgerald was as sadly mistaken about how the media functions in this country as the public was. We all thought that journalists were chomping at the bit to reveal news and when they got a tip they worked hard to find a way to report it. In Viveca Novak’s case, had she just shared what she knew with her editors, for instance, they might have put it together with other information they had from other reporters and maybe found a way to publish a story.
I suppose we were all led astray by “All The President’s Men” (ironically) which showed journalists using anonymously sourced information as a tip to pursue stories further or confirmation of facts they already knew, not as social currency or exclusive information for a book to be published long after the information means anything. Our bad. Apparently, it’s fine for reporters to “gossip” freely among their fellow insiders about their sacred anonymous sources, but a federal crime to tell the public about it. We rubes are supposed to uncritically read their dispatches and buy their books so they can be well paid — and leave the democracy business to our betters.
Update: In retrospect, TIME should have pulled that story she wrote on Woodward or reported immediately that she had been called to testify. It looks bad. She was writing that story on November 18th and she knew she was even more implicated than Woodward. She told her editor on Sunday the 20th so perhaps they couldn’t pull it back by that point. I’m surprised she wasn’t fired on the spot, to tell you the truth. Her behavior is more egregious than Miller’s.
(And once again, why in the hell did Woodward pick her to talk to?)
Update II: James Wolcott calls for another panel on blogger ethics
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