What is the reporter's responsibility?

Salon.com News | Media groups concerned by probe of White House leak

This is an interesting question. I have no problem with reporters refusing to reveal sources for their actual work, for stories they write. For the legal system to force them to do so would have a chilling effect on their ability to do their jobs freely. That's not a tough call.

But what about a reporter, and as I understand it there are at least five of them, who gets a call from the White House revealing that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent and encouraging them to publish that information in order to exact revenge on her husband. At least one of the five, and probably another, declined to do anything with the information, considering it irrelevant to the story, which it was.

Is the reporter really obligated to protect that source? The source was not acting in the interest of public knowledge. He or she was not contributing to an actual story that the reporter was writing. And it was an obvious crime. Washington reporters all know the deal when it comes to revealing the name of a CIA agent. It's huge. As Tony Snow said on Fox News the other morning, they chased Philip Agee all over the world for just that in the 1970s. So, in a sense, if you're a reporter and you get that call, it's not that different from sitting at your desk and getting a call from someone who says, "I have a bomb," or perhaps, not to be melodramatic, the situation Judith Miller was in when an envelope full of white powder arrived at her desk in the middle of the anthrax scare. You're in the story, not reporting it, you're being used (or they're attempting to use you), not merely reporting on the White House.

I'm not sure about this. It's a tough call. But enough people know who outed Plame that it will eventually be revealed.

The other blogger I read, Brad DeLong, is a little too tough on the reporters, I think:

the two White House officials called at least six different reporter. There were at least six people--prominent people--in the elite press corps who have known the whole story since before July 14. The fact that they thought that keeping their Karl Rove brownie points was more important than informing the citizens of the Republic that among Bush's closest White House aides are those who give aid and comfort to our enemies, et cetera--the fact that they thought keeping their Karl Rove brownie points was more important sheds a very interesting light on the flaws in our current press corps.

The only problem is, what if the reporters were in fact told, as Robert Novak says he was told, that Plame was not undercover, that she was merely an "analyst"? This is not to say that Rove or whoever made the calls didn't know they were blowing her cover; they surely did. But the story they were pitching was simply that she worked for the CIA, that she was the one who suggested sending her husband to Niger (possibly with a hint of nefarious motives, such as get him out of town for a week or two), and that therefore there was nothing "official" about his mission. None of this appears to have been true, but my point is that a reporter could get this call and not really understand that using the information would cause Plame's cover to be blown. I believe Novak when he says that he didn't know she was covert. I don't believe him when he says he wasn't used to leak information -- how can he be sure of that?

So, at the time of the call, the other reporters were probably justified in ignoring it, as all of them but Novak did. But what about now? Now that they know what was really going on, shouldn't they ask themselves, "What would I have done if, when [Rove] called, he had said, "I want you to print the name of an undercover CIA agent in order to hurt her family and make her husband regret that he ever went public with the truth"?

That doesn't answer the legal question of whether they should be compelled to testify. But I think it makes their moral obligation a little more clear.

Mark Schmitt

10/01/2003

What is the reporter's responsibility?

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