Convergence Now: Judith Miller, Floyd Abrams, Mark Felt
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As I write this, an extremely surreal moment of convergence is taking place in Fullerton:
I'm sitting 10 feet away from New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
We're listening to First-Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams describe how he tried to keep her out of prison for shielding Cheney operative Scooter Libby in the Valerie Plame identity case.
And I'm reading this - the New York Times' long awaited account of how she allowed the Shield Law - the reporter's privilege against revealing confidential sources - to shoehorn her into helping the Bush administration destroy one of the strongest in-house critics of its policies in Iraq ...
Miller has been imprisoned for 85 days (until Libby came clean and allowed her to identify him) - and lambasted, attacked, slandered and vilified in the blogosphere - for keeping her pledge of confidentiality to a source.
Abrams is railing against "the level of bile, of cruelty, the level of pure madness in what's been written about this. " He adds, "One of the dangers of this situation is of other journalists being put in the position that Judy MIller is in, worrying about - in addition to going to jail - the danger of being subjected to venal attacks of all sorts."
Miller now takes the stage at the event (the California First Amendment Coalition assembly) - ostensibly to present the "Anonymous Source Award" to Mark "Deep Throat" Felt for feeding the Washington Post the Watergate information that toppled the Nixon administration. (Felt's frail and in absentia, his grandson graciously accepts).
She goes on at some length - and with some eloquence - about the shield laws that allow reporters to protect anonymous sources, a relationship without which, she says rightly, government malfeasance could continue almost unchecked:
"Without Mark Felt, there would have been no disclosure of wrongdoing in high places ... without Mark Felt there would have been none of the disclosures of the extraordinary Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein - without Mark Felt the Washington Post wouldn't have had to have struggled with the issue of whether they let these two remarkable reporters follow the stench of the money, wherever it went.
"Our profession and our country owe Mark Felt, Woodward and Bernstein and the Washington Post as well an enormous debt," Miller concludes. "People who become whistle-blowers are not automatically saints, people leak information for a variety of complicated motives - and while reporters must try to understand why someone is telling us something, what matters more is the ... truth and significance of what they are saying."
She presents the award to him - partial standing ovation.
Go read the Times piece - I haven't analyzed it yet, but it's a pretty fascinating account of the extreme amount of deliberation and hand-wringing that went on at the paper over Miller's exposure to prison for the defense of a source - and a principle.
I'll post photos later - I'm on the Cal State Fullerton wireless array, which has a pretty hardcore firewall and wont' allow FTP.Never mind. Photo posted via Flickr.
