That's Incredible

"He's really tainted the role of being a foreign correspondent," says Lorch, now director of the Knight International Press Fellowships. "How many people will now think, 'Oh God, are they really writing the truth?' "

The Outing of Clarke

Fox News correspondent Jim Angle says the tape had been sitting in his desk drawer for a year and a half.

So when former counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke began assailing President Bush's handling of al Qaeda in TV interviews for his new book, Angle asked the National Security Council for permission to put on the record a 2002 "background" briefing in which Clarke had defended the administration's record. And the White House, which had mounted a media blitz against Clarke, was all too willing to waive the confidentiality rule that had shielded Clarke's identity when he was spinning for Bush.

"They knew zip," Angle says. "They didn't know when it happened, that it happened or who was on the call."

But wasn't this an unfair outing of Clarke, who was blindsided? Former senator Bob Kerrey, a member of the 9/11 investigating commission, grumbled that "Fox should say 'occasionally fair and balanced' after putting something like this out, because they violated a serious trust."

But Angle, who says he left two messages for Clarke, says: "It wasn't his rule. It was an easy call," and that he would have done the same story if he were still working for ABC.

What about the administration's extraordinary waiving of confidentiality to discredit a critic? "It's important for the American people to have the facts," says White House spokesman Scott McClellan. Clarke had made "comments that contradict what he was now asserting publicly. It was very much in the public interest." (Clarke says he would have been fired had he criticized the president as a White House aide.)

McClellan says the administration has put such background comments on the record before, though he concedes it "may be something of a unique situation" to do it so long after the fact. To "be fair to all reporters," he says, the White House notified the other network correspondents who had heard the Clarke briefing that it was fair game. Only Fox went with the story.