In May, 500 members of the media elite rose to their feet to applaud a First Amendment award the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press gave to lawyer Floyd Abrams. Jointly presenting the award at a gala dinner in Manhattan were Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Judith Miller of the New York Times. For a year, Mr. Abrams had worked to fend off a special prosecutor seeking testimony about...
Reporters Without Borders wrote to Pakistani foreign affairs minister Makhdoom Khusro Bakhtiar today voicing astonishment at the action of the authorities in refusing entry to Indian journalist Harider Baweja of the independent weekly Tehelka on her arrival at Lahore international airport (in the eastern province of Punjab) on 22 July although she had a valid seven-day visa. She was told she was...
Judith Miller, the New York Times, and some members of Congress picked a bad time to make a stand for journalistic integrity. Miller, a Times reporter, is in jail for not revealing the identity of a White House source in an article (never published) about CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose husband is a vocal critic of the Iraq War. The Times has stood behind Miller, declaring that the relationship...
Something doesn't add up about why Judith Miller went to jail. The New York Times reporter didn't write a story about the Valerie Plame case and had a waiver from her source in order to talk about it to the grand jury. But she insisted on going to jail anyway. Speculation is mounting that Miller is protecting herself─that Miller was herself a source of information about Plame that made it to...
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC), the Government’s top watchdog agencies, say that they should get immunity under the 2005 Right to Information Act. In other words, citizens shouldn’t be given the right to ask for information regarding the nature of their functioning–or the cases they handle. The heads of both the departments have told The Sunday...
Press freedom in the United States was dealt a blow last week with the Supreme Court's refusal to hear an appeal by two journalists who face jail for refusing to reveal their confidential sources and ignoring subpoenas to testify before a grand jury. The decision has several IFEX members concerned that the decision gives authoritarian regimes further ammunition to justify crackdowns on the press....
Media types desperate for a sliver of encouraging news about public support can grasp it in the latest State of the First Amendment survey's findings about unnamed sources. The 2005 edition of the poll, commissioned by the First Amendment Center in collaboration with AJR, found that 69 percent of Americans agree with the statement: "Journalists should be allowed to keep a news source confidential...
Judith Miller is an American hero. Forget Ahmed Chalabi and all of those off-target stories about Saddam's WMD. When crunch time came, Miller hung tough. Not for her the cave-in of Time Inc. honcho Norm Pearlstine, who gave up Time reporter Matt Cooper's notes. Not for her the last-minute "waiver" route that Cooper took in deciding to testify before the grand jury investigating who leaked the...
WASHINGTON -- Attention, fellow journalists: Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has blown our cover. In his argument for why New York Times reporter Judith Miller should be jailed until she tells a grand jury who revealed the name of a CIA operative to her, Fitzgerald stated that "journalists are not entitled to promise complete confidentiality. No one in America is." He's right. But what's...
Just about every week, the phone rings with an earnest, young journalism student at the other end asking what he or she needs to do to become a reporter. Some have already given it a great deal of thought. Most have not. For a while now, I've toyed with the notion of one day writing a book, a kind of road map for would-be reporters on some of the obstacles ahead. I'm not sure what I'd call it...
