A Case of Bad Ink: Portrait of Media Is Not So Flattering

"Fitzgerald has created a terrible precedent here with his use of waivers to force [journalists] to testify," says Byron York, who covered the trial for National Review. "That's got to have a chilling effect." He says an "air of coercion" surrounded the ostensibly voluntary waivers from administration officials.

Russert said on NBC last night that he is "concerned we not create a pattern" of journalists being compelled to testify, "but when you are called, you tell the truth."

Bob Zelnick, a Boston University journalism professor, sees "a self-inflicted wound by the mainstream media," which greeted the 2003 Novak column that disclosed Plame's secret CIA connection with "howls of outrage" and demands for investigation. The uproar led to Fitzgerald's appointment.

"Fitzgerald was overzealous," Zelnick says, and "the effect is serious and adverse. It's going to take a long time for reporters and their sources to figure out how to deal with each other in a way that doesn't risk contempt citations and imprisonment." At the same time, Zelnick says he couldn't have broken the stories he did as a Pentagon reporter without relying on unnamed sources.

The administration's selection of reporters to leak to was carefully choreographed. Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus, who covers national security, testified that then-press secretary Ari Fleischer "swerved off" during a conversation and told him about Plame. Libby testified that Cheney "instructed me to go and talk to Judith Miller and lay this out for her," using previously secret information that Cheney had President Bush declassify.

"It's very troubling that there's this cabal," says Merritt, who criticized Miller's 2002 and 2003 reports on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, some of which turned out to be wrong. "It's not so much that administration officials share information with reporters. It's that they pick reporters who they think are going to spin it their way."

Although the controversy involved the White House and the case for war, reporters at every city hall and statehouse in the country face a similar dilemma: How can they cultivate the right people to get scoops without compromising their independence?

"Editors so prize access and the fruits of that access that we don't stop often enough to think 'Is so-and-so getting too close to the people he covers?' " says the Tribune's Warren. "It could be the person at the cop shop in town."

If there's one saving grace for the news business, it's that much of the public long ago tuned out the intricate case. "My guess," Judd says, "is there's not a huge amount of interest in this story outside the Beltway."