Source Protection

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The perjury trial of former White House official Lewis "Scooter" Libby begins on Tuesday, but the investigation has already laid bare the Bush administration's internal workings and damaged the independence of the news media. Vice President Dick Cheney is among the prominent government officials and journalists expected to testify in a case that will examine the White House...

BRUSSELS, Belgium: A European Union high court on Wednesday denied a German journalist's request for damages after the EU anti-fraud office gave information to law enforcement authorities that led to his detention. The EU's Court of First Instance said that handing over the information about Hans-Martin Tillack, who was a correspondent for German news weekly Stern, to authorities in Belgium and...

Most of the time these days, when I scour the "media" looking for a sign of hope about mankind, I inevitably trip over a discouraging spew of waste matter passing as news of importance. Historically, the name we give this offal is propaganda. Its spewers are often reporter-impersonators. The Defense Department, CIA, and White House have been hiring these performers in large numbers lately to...

The idea that reporters have a duty to protect their sources has an honored place in journalistic lore. It goes without saying that Woodward and Bernstein would never have burned Deep Throat. In The Insider, 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman is tormented by the possibility that the tobacco industry whistle-blower he tried to shield might be harmed. And now, one of the more troublesome issues in...

More than anyone else in the media universe, author and Washington Post editor Bob Woodward, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Detroit Free-Press sports columnist Mitch Albom and Newsweek magazine had a year to forget. Woodward and Miller were Pulitzer recipients. Albom is an award-winning sportswriter and a best-selling author to boot. Newsweek won the magazine industry's coveted...

(December 11, 2005) -- Where will it end, and when will reporters pay with their jobs? First we learn that Bob Woodward failed to tell his editor for years about his role in the Plame/CIA leak case. Today, we find out that Time reporter Viveca Novak not only kept her editors in the dark about her own involvement, but even had a two-hour chat with the special prosecutor about it well before telling...

LOS ANGELES -- An explosive article in January's Vanity Fair details the sundry adventures of Judith Miller and the New York Times surrounding the controversial reporter’s decision to be jailed for refusing to identify her source to a grand jury investigating the case of who outed covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. The magazine is out on newsstands in Los Angeles. The story, by Seth Mnookin, splashes...

It was a moment both remarkable and uncomfortable. There, on the night of November 21, was Bob Woodward looking nervous and dry-mouthed, trying to defend his hard-earned legacy to – of all people – a suddenly aggressive and sharp-elbowed Larry King. "So it’s quid pro quo," said the cable schmooze-meister to his old pal Woodward, snappily summing up the reporter’s symbiotic relationships with his...

Bob Woodward probably hoped that the long holiday weekend would break the momentum of an uproar that suddenly confronted him midway through November. But three days after Thanksgiving, on NBC's "Meet the Press," a question about the famed Washington Post reporter provoked anything but the customary adulation. "I think none of us can really understand Bob's silence for two years about his own role...

Early on in Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward’s surprisingly useful if analytically inane account of the inner machinations behind the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, Mr. Woodward supplies a little forensic digression on the White House, message discipline and the meaning of the phrase "senior administration officials." "A news story with that attribution," he wrote, "often carries a...