BushCo Revs Up Legal Pressure on ‘Journalists’

NY Times: “Journalists Say Threat of Subpoena Intensifies – Public Trust Wanes as Legal Fears Rise,” by Katharine Q. Seelye, July 4, 2005.

Another interesting piece from July 4th, albeit somewhat visible on the front page of the Business section.

The immediate issue, of course, is the imminent jailing of Judith Miller, a Middle East correspondent of the Times – her cohort Matt Cooper of TIME having been bailed out by the corporate decision to go along with the subpoena arising from the Bob Novak / Valerie Plame “outing” –

as part of a generally repressive attitude towards “journalists” by the Bush administration and state / local officials who take their cue from Washington.

The reason for calling them “journalists” is because Miller was such a willing accomplice of Bush and Rummy in retailing all over the Times front page their bullshit “explanations” for the invasion of Iraq – which, as the two previous posts indicate, has turned out so well for all involved –

a specific instance of the generally pathetic way in which the MSM has conducted itself, really, since the end of the Cold War, as we pointed out in both the Post-Modernism with a Human Face  and Millennium Crisis   lectures.

The insane Bush regime vs. the craven mainstream media  – it seems the whole world has become like the fucking Arab / Israeli situation – all bad guys engaging in emotional blackmail with everyone they can [bold emphasis mine] …

Lawyers for the news media say that the legal climate for those seeking to protect confidential sources is turning chillier, with more subpoenas being issued to reporters. There is no database that tracks such subpoenas, and some prosecutors dispute that they are on the rise. But a series of high-profile cases involving confidential sources has the news media on edge.

“It does feel like open season,” said Laura Handman, a First Amendment lawyer based in Washington. “There are more instances of courts ordering confidential sources to be disclosed,” she said, adding that she believed the Bush administration’s emphasis on secrecy was partly to blame. “This leads to more leak inquiries, which, in turn, leads to more subpoenas.”

In the last year, more than two dozen reporters across the country have been subpoenaed or questioned about their confidential sources in cases before federal courts, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Paul J. Boyle, senior vice president of the association, said he believed that “the filing of subpoenas, as well as the letters and phone calls that media companies receive from prosecutors and civil litigants, is on the rise.”

Kurt Wimmer, a media lawyer whose firm, Covington & Burling, represents 45 television stations in 40 states, said he had as many subpoenas against reporters in the first three months of this year as he had in all of last year. …

“When the Supreme Court says there’s nothing wrong with forcing reporters to testify and go to jail, other lawyers are looking at that and saying, ‘Why shouldn’t I subpoena a reporter?’” Mr. Wimmer said.

Here’s the rationale …

Martin London, a New York lawyer who has litigated several media cases and subpoenaed nearly a dozen reporters in 1972 on behalf of Spiro T. Agnew, the former vice president … said high-profile scandals at various news organizations, including The New York Times and CBS News, have undermined confidence in the news media.

“I don’t buy that there is any increase in subpoenas,” Mr. London said. “The Miller-Cooper case is very unusual, it has a lot of wrinkles that are just sort of extraordinary. But it’s perfectly reasonable in a post-9/11 world for the government to be concerned about the security of C.I.A. information.”

And the “controlling legal authority,” to quote Al Gore, in this case is none other than a former academic and alleged intellectual, Richard Posner:

[T]here was a change after a 2003 ruling written by Richard Posner, an influential federal appeals court judge in Chicago, who said that lower courts had been misreading a 1972 Supreme Court decision, Branzburg v. Hayes. That case in fact rejected the idea of First Amendment protections for reporters, but media lawyers over three decades managed to convince judges otherwise.

“He seems to have freed some of his colleagues to pull back on the privilege,” said Sandra Baron, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center.

Way to go, Dick … and his pals are indeed taking advantage of it …

“The biggest fear that most reporters have now is not having their mail taken or their phone records taken without their being told,” said John Solomon, who oversees investigative reporting for the Associated Press and who had both of those things happen to him, in 2002 and 2001, respectively. “The biggest concern is that they’ll write about something and will be forced to talk about it.”

Representative Mike Pence, the Indiana Republican who is pushing, so far unsuccessfully, for Congress to pass a federal law to protect journalists, said that fear was justified. “No reporter, as the law has evolved in the last 30 years, can give absolute assurance to any source that at no time will their identity be disclosed,” he said.

Wow, an Indiana Republican doing that ??? Must be from the Richard Lugar – as opposed to Dan Burton / Mitch Daniels – wing of the party … most unexpected …

In addition to the Lee and Miller-Cooper cases, there have been several other high-profile cases involving confidential sources. Jim Taricani, a reporter with WJAR, a television station in Providence, R.I., refused to reveal the identity of the person who leaked him an F.B.I. videotape of a politician taking a bribe. He was sentenced to six months of home detention in December and was released after four months.

Nine news organizations have been subpoenaed in the case involving Steven J. Hatfill, a scientist, who sued federal officials under the privacy act for naming him as a “person of interest” in the 2001 anthrax investigations. As many as 100 federal agents have waived any confidentiality agreements they had with the media in that case.

But, of course, it’s significantly the media’s own fault that all this shit is coming down on them:

The cases come as polls show the public has a deepening distrust of the news media, although a study by the Pew Research Center last month found that 76 percent of Americans think the use of confidential sources is at least sometimes justified.

Michael Getler, the ombudsman for The Washington Post, cautioned between linking what he agrees is a rise in the number of legal proceedings over sources and the low regard in which the news media is held.

“There clearly is a more widespread ideological assault from both sides on the press these days, and that may well be feeding some of the prosecutorial zeal,” he said. “But I don’t know that that is really the case. I don’t think we know enough to say exactly what is driving individual prosecutors.”

Perhaps, Mike … but whatever the reason, it doesn’t say much about the “democratic” character of a country invading other countries in the name of “democracy” …

no matter how TRULY pathetic the mainstream media has shown itself to be for the last decade and a half.