February 21, 2007
Not So Fast, Chronicle
The Chronicle has been doing a lot of back-slapping over their work in the BALCO case, turning their two reporters, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, into full and official Martyrs of the Constitution, complete with the victory lap around the newsroom. Yay, Chronicle. But maybe they shouldn't be so excited.
The revelation that the leaker was defense attorney Troy Ellerman might have gotten Williams and Fainaru-Wada off the hook, but it put the Chronicle on it. See, the problem is that the leaker was also the one who tried to get the case dismissed because of the leaks. He was, in effect, using the Chronicle to get the case thrown out. And not only did the Chron know that, they went back to him to get more information despite it all. In a blistering column in Slate, Jack Shafer says that in their actions, Williams and Fainaru-Wada were "sanctioning" the lawyer's "sleazy" moves. They were enablers, in other words.
Up until the leaker was discovered, other journalists were on board the Chronicle Love Train. Now, not so much. In a column in the LA Times, media critic Tim Rutten, castigates the Chron for subverting the importance of journalistic privilege for their own purposes. Says Rutten:
"Conspiring with somebody you know is actively perverting the administration of justice to your mutual advantage is a betrayal of the public interest whose protection is the only basis on which journalistic privilege of any sort has a right to assert itself.
See, here's the crux of the matter-- journalistic privilege is one of the bedrocks of a free press. But in order for journalists to be able to hold to it, they need the people's trust that they're doing it for all the right reasons and in ways that won't ultimately do harm. What the Chronicle is accused of is breaking that trust-- they claimed journalistic privilege for a guy who was using it for his own advantage. As Shafer points out, every sort of case like this features ulterior motives by the people involved, for both the leaker and reporter. It's just that one has to weigh whether the ulterior motives outweigh the benefits of the story. Like Plamegate, that might not necessarily be true of this story.
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Sadly I expect Jon's post to generate little interest or commentary. But what the hell, let's give it a go...
Josh Wolf? If you read the Chronicle you may recognize the name. Then again, maybe not. All the front page professional sports (read: entertainment) news about Barry Bonds is hardly in the league of a Federal government crackdown on dissent. Ask yourself whether the Federal Government would have gotten involved had Josh videotaped rampaging Giant's fans after a World Series victory.
Why are Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada so deserving of hero journalist status when they were actually gaming the system and in the thick of the story themselves? Well, they sold lots of papers. What's Josh done for the Chronicle stockholders lately?
Campers,
It's worse than that. The Chron is a Hearst paper and used their multi-billion dollar dollar kitty to come to something like 20 state attorney generals pushing them to call for dropping the case against their reporters, but not Josh Wolf.
The federal shield law the Chron is pushing allows the government to keep Wolf an other alternative media types in jail because the government can decide who is a real reporter and who is not. The federal prosecutor at Josh's las hearing said that Josh was just "a delusional guy with a camera". That's fine with the Chron.
Locally, the cops decide who's a real reporter and who's not. They rescinded over a thousand press passes.
h.
The three major journalistic privilege cases in the past couple of years, the Chronicle's Balco situation, Judith Miller and Bob Novak allowing themselves to be used as tools of the Bush Administration, and Josh Wolf all seem to be distorting what shield laws are supposed to be about: protecting whistleblowers who expose goverment and corporate corruption and illegal activity by coming forward to speak with reporters. The Chronicle reporters apparently accepted and published these leaks while knowing that the leaker was trying to get the case tossed because of the leaks that he was supplying. Bob Novak was protecting a government source that exposed a covert CIA agent as retribution for dissent from her husband.
Josh Wolf refuses to turn over his video claiming that as a journalist, he shouldn't have to, but seems to me that journalists don't walk around shooting video of their buddies all day and yell insults at the subjects they are filming ("Your career is over fajita boy!"). This shouldn't be a federal case to begin with, and you can argue that no one should have to submit their videos to criminal investigations. While it might be honorable to not rat out your friends, I still have a hard time seeing him as a clear cut journalist in this instance. In any case, the feds are just making Wolf into a martyr and might as well let him go at this point.
Brizz couldn't be more right about Josh's status today. He now has his bona fides as a journalist. That much has been accomplished with his prison time. Just glad I'm not in on that job training program!
He's not going to turn over the tape and no one has been nor will be charged with a crime in the incident. It's well past the time to move on and release him.
I think you mean, "attempted to set the record straight by providing information that countered the false impression given by her husband, in a misleading op-ed, that he had been sent to Africa by Dick Cheney rather than recommended by his wife for the trip."