Here's Robert Scheer with one side of an issue that has me genuinely on the fence. Increasingly, government officials are leaking stories to reporters that turn out to be either not quite true or not at all true. The leak is calculated to advance the official's agenda and may even be a crime…but the ethics of journalism are supposed to protect the leaker: The reporter is honor-bound not to reveal who told him or her what they printed, in effect covering for someone who may have broken the law. There seems to me little doubt that someone in the government, figuring they could hide behind that shield, planted phony stories about Wen Ho Lee, the scientist who was locked away in solitary confinement for nine months and hit with all sorts of espionage charges that later evaporated. The stories were obviously intended to scare the accused into some sort of plea bargain and confession to a crime for which there was otherwise insufficient evidence. Should the reporters who printed those stories be compelled to reveal their source? One doesn't want to see that kind of sleazy trial-by-phony-leak tactic go unpunished but one also doesn't want to see the mechanism put in place to uncover legit news sources. So I dunno…
Same thing with the Valerie Plame leak. Someone may have broken the law by "outing" a C.I.A. operative but if so, that someone can never be caught as long as the reporter who received and published the leak can claim First Amendment protection. I see both sides of the argument in this one. Anonymous leakers and sources have helped the press uncover enormous amounts of wrongdoing and scandal…but they have also created a lot of it, as well.
There has always been a certain conflict between the two positions. Back during the Impeachment Festivities, it seemed pretty evident that Ken Starr's office was leaking anti-Clinton info to reporters in probable violation of the law. Reporters who were printing those stories were also reporting that others were charging Starr with such leaks, and then they were publishing Starr's denials. This made for an odd situation. If Starr was not leaking, then reporters who knew the charges to be false were publishing them without comment. If he was leaking, then reporters were publishing his denials, knowing full well they were lies. Either way, someone was wrong and the reporters knew who it was and weren't telling.
Going back a few more scandals: During Watergate (and before that, the Pentagon Papers), we heard a lot about the right of reporters to protect their sources but also more discussion of the need to weigh that right against possible abuse. The Wen Ho Lee case sure feels to me like a definite abuse. Before it, I felt that nothing should ever force a member of the working press to divulge a source. Now, I'm not so sure.