As I’ve noted a few times now I’m not convinced — though none of us have enough information — that Judy Miller is in prison right now because of things she did as a journalist, properly speaking. In various chapters of the war and intelligence drama we’ve all witnessed over the last four years, Miller has been an actor as much as a journalist, often acting in close coordination with the folks who figure as prime suspects in this caper.
That said, there is a line of thinking that’s become fairly widespread among the president’s critics and many Democrats that says that journalistic privilege is meant to protect whistleblowers and sources exposing wrong-doing not sources who are the wrongdoers themselves.
There’s a certain moral economy to this reasoning. But in practice, in the real world journalists operate in, that reasoning just doesn’t hold water. It’s a specious reasoning that allows people to have their civil libertarian cake and eat it too.
(I’ll try to elaborate on why I think this in a subsequent post.)
Finally, in such a swirl of ethical and political uncertainty, perhaps we can take some heart from the editorialists at the Washington Post. They seem fairly clear that there’s little chance that a crime was committed, and that whatever may have happened wasn’t such a big deal in the first place.
Good to know they’ve got this one squared away.
