Source Protection

Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper's 6-year-old son doesn't read the New York Times or watch C-SPAN, so as Christmas approached he remained blissfully ignorant that his father faced up to 18 months in jail for refusing to reveal his confidential sources. While a three-judge federal appeals court panel in Washington weighed whether the First Amendment and legal precedent bestow a "reporter's...

In November 1969 Paul Branzburg, a twenty-eight-year-old reporter with the Louisville Courier-Journal, spent a few days hanging out with two local men for a story about how they planned to clear $5,000 making and selling a batch of hashish. The resulting article, THE HASH THEY MAKE ISN'T TO EAT, ran in the paper’s November 15 edition. In it Branzburg, a graduate of Harvard Law School and Columbia...

As the war in Iraq has turned into a grueling occupation, the question of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction persists. To investigate that question, there would seem to be no better-qualified reporter on Earth than Judith Miller of the New York Times. Miller is a genuine expert on weapons of mass destruction or, in Washington parlance, WMD. She has written important books about Saddam...