Leak? What Leak?

"For the average American, it is unseemly for the president's senior adviser, using inside information, to discredit enemies of the president anonymously."

Jeff Jarvis is Not Exactly Excited by all this:

"I got email from a blog friend asking why I haven't been on top of l'affaire Rove (formerly known as l'affaire Plame) and the truth is that I just didn't keep up with all the ins and outs. The implication when people ask a blogger why he's not writing about a story is that there's a political motive: Why are you and Reynolds ignoring Rove? Confess! Apologize! Blog!

"But, in fact, it's usually just the case that the blogger simply doesn't care about the story and since a blog isn't a newspaper of record -- a blog is personal -- that's perfectly fine. I have not been a devotee of the Niger-Wilson-Plame-Miller-Cooper-Rove game of hot potato from the start. It's a pretty sleazy story of overlapping hidden agendas. I don't get my rocks off digging into scandals. And so I have not written about it. I haven't had anything worthwhile to add.

"Still, I will admit it's time to catch up. But I look at the mountain of charges and countercharges with exhaustion. Just today, I read the NY Times story about White House silence (what we used to call stonewalling) on the hit reality show Rove and the Reporters past the jump without getting a summary of what exactly is now known or acknowledged about Rove's involvement. The Times assumes that we're all keeping up on every back-and-forth like good Sisyphusean scandalmongers. I haven't been. But The Times can't edit every story for ignorant dolts like me who haven't been keeping track of a story. Newspapers try; they add background graphs into the middle of tales but in the case of a saga like Rove/Plame, it's impossible to sum it all up in a graph or two."

Slate Editor Jake Weisberg argues that journalists should sometimes expose their sources: "Can the nation's leading newspaper really find it an easy call to defy the nation's high court when faced with a ruling it doesn't like? Is corporate disobedience--which would have been a new one on Thoreau and King--really a principle the Times wants to establish?. . . .

"If someone goes off the record to offer a journalist a bribe, or threaten violence, the importance of what the source has told a reporter may simply supersede the promise to keep mum. To take an extreme example, any reporter of integrity would reveal off-the-record information about an upcoming terrorist attack or serious crime. In the Plame case, the crime under investigation consists in speaking to reporters. No plausible shield law would, or should, protect a reporter in this situation, because there's no way for a prosecutor to develop a case against a perpetrator without evidence from the recipients of the leak."

My analysis of the NYT legal strategy in the case, compared to those of other news outlets whose reporters were subpoenaed, is here.

Richard Stengel writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, sees secret sources as dangerously habit-forming:

"The use of anonymous sources certainly is an important tool for journalists. I used them myself when I was a reporter. But it is a tool that is often abused and one whose value is overstated. In many ways, anonymous sources have become the crack cocaine of journalism: easy, addictive and dangerous.

"Anonymous sources should be used to level the playing field between the powerful and the powerless. In a republic, the ability of individuals to speak truth to power is the reason the framers made the press the only private institution specifically protected by the Constitution. Certainly, anonymous sources have helped change the course of history - the use of such sources contributed to the unraveling of the Watergate scandal. But more often than not these days, they have become a device to preserve and enhance power rather than question it - a tool journalists use to advance their own careers rather than the disinterested pursuit of the truth.

"In my experience, most anonymous leads were either water-cooler gossip, poison darts, or self-interested information leaked to help the agendas of officeholders. Indeed, the leak at the heart of the Valerie Plame case was a government official settling scores with Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, because Wilson questioned the administration's argument that Iraq was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."