Guild mentality. Salon's readers have made it pretty clear that they think the magazine has its head firmly up its ass in its defense of Judith Miller's refusal to testify in the Plame matter.

It was reasonable to expect at least some anti-Miller letters in the wake of [Farhad] Manjoo's and freelance reporter Michael Scherer's Salon stories about the Miller case. Like virtually everyone else in every branch of the media, Manjoo and Scherer reported Miller's impending and then actual imprisonment as a dark day for press freedom. Also like almost everyone else in the media, both stories sought to put the bizarre details of Miller's dilemma in context, while dancing around its most uncomfortable elements: Miller's tarnished record and the presumed involvement of Rove, dark prince of the George W. Bush White House.

But it's safe to say that everyone here was surprised by the consistently enraged tone of the letters -- furious might be a better word -- and by the insistence of many writers that Salon's coverage had fundamentally missed the story. Of the dozens of letters we have received on this issue over the last few weeks, no more than a half-dozen have supported the general tenor of Manjoo and Scherer's reporting, or indeed have seen the Miller case as in any way a matter of fundamental freedoms.

So what's Joan Walsh go and do in the face of this reader outrage? Assign Andrew O'Hehir to try to push that melon a few more inches colonwards!

There's so much wrong in this piece that in the interest of time (and my own sanity) I'll just focus on what strikes me as the most wrong. The crux of O'Hehir's argument, if I can dignify it by calling it that, is that the Left has let its (admittedly justified) disgust for Miller's role in hyping the Iraq WMD story get the better of its commitment to First Amendment principle. (OK, just a nod to the second-most wrong thing. O'Hehir's bizarre insistence that Miller was no more than a patsy, "a skilled veteran reporter ... [who got] thoroughly hustled out of her shorts by a White House bagman," when everything we know says that she was a willing, highly networked, and ideologically committed participant in the WMD scam—well, I think that says something about O'Hehir's standard of argument here.) His counter-reference is to the ACLU's famous defense of Nazi marchers in Skokie:

It was back in 1977 when a small band of neo-Nazis from the South Side of Chicago launched a year-long legal battle by applying for a permit to march in Skokie, Ill., a suburban community with a majority Jewish population and a large number of Holocaust survivors. The neo-Nazis were a pack of losers with no coherent political ideology and little message beyond hate speech; their proposal to march in Skokie was pure provocation. But the various ordinances Skokie officials passed to try to stop the march were transparently unconstitutional, and the ACLU took the Nazis' case all the way to the Supreme Court, winning at every stage. Jewish members of the civil liberties group resigned by the thousands -- nationally, the ACLU lost 15 percent of its membership -- and some tension between Jewish organizations and the ACLU lingers to this day.

It should go without saying that for civil-liberties advocates and constitutional scholars, the issue was never whether the Nazis were repugnant (they were) or had anything to say (they didn't). Instead, it was a question of what legal precedent was being set. "If we had lost, a brand new set of First Amendment law would have been created," David Hamlin, then the executive director of the Illinois ACLU, said a few years later. "Any community in the country would have had the legal power to pass laws like Skokie's that would stifle not just Nazis but anyone they didn't like."

There's no need to draw the parallel out further, except to observe that the principle here is not approximately the same, but exactly the same. Even if you believe that Judith Miller is nothing more than "a shill for the Bush administration" (a Florida reader) or "a co-conspirator in a government coverup" (a Missouri reader), she's still entitled to the same constitutional protections as Greg Palast and Amy Goodman. Even, God help us, as Robert Novak, who seems to have peed his drawers and spilled the beans the moment the independent prosecutor rattled his cage. The First Amendment covers all members of the press, without regard to truthfulness, integrity or their perceived similarity to sub-reptilian life forms.

First of all, not even I think that Judith Miller is as repugnant as a bunch of Nazis low-lifes. But past that: how the hell does the Miller jailing in any respect, much less "exactly," raise the same principle as the Skokie march? O'Hehir asserts, but doesn't bother to explain—no need to "draw the parallel out further," apparently we're all just supposed to see it. Well, I don't. The Nazis had to be defended because their direct exercise of political speech, as well as their right to peaceably assemble, was going to be abridged, and for no better reason than community outrage. The outrage was more than justified: but if the First Amendment fails to protect provocative speech, then it fails to protect any politically meaningful speech. That's a clear and compelling principle, and David Hamlin is right, the ACLU had no choice but to defend it in Skokie.

What provocative exercise of speech is being penalized or abridged because Judith Miller is sitting in jail? She's asserting a privilege, nothing more: the privilege of maintaining promised confidentiality, at her own discretion and with no appeal from her judgement. (Which no doubt just seems the way things ought to work, to someone possessed of Judy Miller's ego.) We might argue about the utility of that privilege being given to journalists, for the sake of the public interest, we might argue about the proper latitude the privilege should be afforded in civil or criminal matters; I can't see how there's any argument, though, that what we're talking about rises to the level of constitutional principle.

It no doubt warms O'Hehir's cockles to think so, but the First Amendment is not a blanket grant of immunity to journalists. You don't magically become free of the ordinary responsibilities of citizenship, or the constraints of the law, just because you've got a J-school certificate. And in any case Judy Miller is not in jail because she exercised her constitutional rights (she didn't even write a story off the leak she was given), or even because she did her job in a way somebody powerful took offense at. (Miller's receiving the Plame leak isn't of itself something that puts her in jeopardy.) She's in jail because she is potentially a witness to a federal crime, and has refused to answer questions legitimately put to her by a prosecutor investigating that crime.

The one catch here is that the crime Miller may have witnessed not only occured in the course of her reportorial work: the crime was, precisely, commited by someone in the act of passing information to her in her capacity as a journalist. In that sense, whether she wrote a story or not is beside the point: if it's a crime to pass certain kinds of information to a reporter, that at least in theory places a burden on the free working of the press. But it's a burden that arises from the desire to uphold a competing public interest: a complete free-for-all on classified information might well cripple some operations of government. Which means that circumspection, considerable circumspection, is required on both sides of the equation. In Miller's case it's not as if there hasn't been plenty of care taken already. Since we're two years into an investigation that's only now reached this legal pass (per DOJ guidelines that reporters are not to be routinely subpoenaed in criminal investigations), and since the prosecutor's actions at every step have been overseen by the independent judiciary (the only other party so far privy to the facts gathered in the case), I think it's safe to say that characterizing Fitzgerald (as O'Hehir does at the end of the article, in an approving quote from another reader letter) as "out of control" is pretty well out of bounds. Any constitutional protection to which Judith Miller is entitled—given that there's no such thing as an absolute protection here—looks to have been pretty thoroughly honored in the judicial process.

But for journalists like O'Hehir, this really isn't about the weighing of different sorts of public interest, it's about the perception of a threat to what they consider their rightful privileges, as members of a special class. (Never mind that American constitutional law has never actually made journalists a special class: it's what they believe, part of the lore of the trade.) O'Hehir concludes his article with several concessory paragraphs about how "the public's baleful view of the press is not totally without merit." The Times WMD reporting gets in there, as does Jayson Blair, as does right-wing capring about liberal bias, media pack mentality, the tabloid race to the bottom, and so on. O'Hehir feels more journalistic self-criticism is in order to rectify the growing public mistrust: well, self-criticism begins at home, Andrew. Next time you make out a list like that, try adding your own guild mentality to it.

posted by michael  4:10:36 PM  
tell me about it []  trackback []

 

Cooties. A small point, maybe, but it's been on my mind as I attempt to sort through the Rove-Plame scandal, and it may be the only thing I can say about the whole deal that I haven't seen somebody (or many somebodies) more informed than me say already.

Juan Cole offered this yesterday, ruminating about the motive for the burning of Valerie Plame:

The whole thing only makes sense if Rove is a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist to begin with. Why would it matter that Valerie Plame suggested to the CIA that they send her husband Joe Wilson to Niger? Wilson had excellent credentials for the mission, which the CIA immediately recognized.

Rove can only have thought it would discredit Wilson to associate his mission with the CIA if he viewed the CIA as the enemy. This is the Richard Perle line. If Wilson was sent to Niger on the recommendation of a CIA operative, then he was not an objective ex-ambassador but a CIA plant of some sort, attempting to undermine the Bush administration and the military occupation of Iraq.

Now, I have no doubt that Rove does, indeed view the CIA as the enemy (a position he shares with the Dick Cheney side of the operation, though I'd bet he's not as ideological about it as they are). But it seems clear to me that the line being taken in the Plame outing was not what Cole theorizes here, namely that it's the CIA part of the Valerie Plame association that was intended to discredit Wilson in the eyes of the world.

What was? Here's Walter Pincus last week:

On July 12, 2003, an administration official, who was talking to me confidentially about a matter involving alleged Iraqi nuclear activities, veered off the precise matter we were discussing and told me that the White House had not paid attention to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's CIA-sponsored February 2002 trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife.

(The date's important here because it signifies that the story line had already been established in advance of Novak's column, and was ready to launch as soon as publication of the column gave cover for it.) His wife got him the job. Remember the barbs thrown all last year at Theresa Heinz Kerry? Remember the continual, snickering deployment of tropes of effeminacy (many of them featured in the pages of the NY Times) against her husband, Fancy Pants John? His wife got him the job is a pure product of the Rovian imaginary, as clear an indication as possible that the White House had determined on waging a sneer campaign to turn Joe Wilson into a joke. Ol' Pussy-Whipped Joe? Why would we bother paying attention to him?

It's something of a handicap, for those on our side, that we just can't believe that they believe this shit: who among us would think that it discredited a man that he'd got a position on his wife's recommendation? As if such a thing gave him cooties? (And, for the record, Wilson insists persuasively that there was no recommendation; Plame merely offered her husband's name when the trip was being determined on.) And yet we've seen for years that this is exactly how the Rove GOP works, and how it thinks: repressive politics fueled by hysterical masculinity ("the butch issue," Richard Goldstein called it last year) is the center, and represents the limit, of its imagination.

What's more, the story tells us something about the press and its culture in GOP captivity. I think it may be a simulacrum of the truth, the Repulican talking point (via Ken Mehlman and others) that has Rove simply trying to warn Matt Cooper off the story. I don't think the sneer campaign was meant to discredit Wilson to the public: it was meant to discredit him to the press, to signal to the White House media lemmings that there was no need to take Joe Wilson seriously, no basis for it. To make Wilson too much an embarrassment for anybody to think of employing him as a source. Isn't that just the sort of gossip that must pass as currency within the D.C. press corps? Isn't it gossip, finally, that Rove was counting on to do his work in this case? (He only miscalculated, stupidly, the Agency-fueled storm that would greet the outing of an undercover operative.) Rove knows his audience, after all. They're the same people who'd get no end of chuckles out of exactly that kind of treatment, when it was meted out against the Democratic candidate for president a year later.

posted by michael  11:52:24 AM  
tell me about it []  trackback []