Judy Misjudged

Posted on October 19, 2005 in Accountability Journalists & Pundits

I doubt that I have scooped Jane Hamsher and I must say that I hate commenting on current affairs, but the decision of the Society of Professional Journalists to give its prestigious “First Amendment Award” to Judy Miller dumbfounds me. As reported at FAIR Miller won the award for “apparently collaborating with and protecting a powerful official in an effort to punish the free speech of a government critic.”

The FAIR article goes on to say:

Miller understood that Libby was not a whistleblower but was someone out to punish a government critic. Not only was it unethical for her to agree to identify Libby in a misleading way, but promising him any kind of anonymity in this case violated the Times’ rules against allowing unnamed sources to make partisan attacks.

This award tells us much about how reporters have departed from the courage which led to the Watergate exposes. The change might be summed up thusly: First, we have the brief Golden Age of Journalism when the Fourth Estate acted as an actual check on the Federal Government. Then we have the period when reporters became afraid of toppling the corrupt bureaucrats who dominated Executive Branch affairs during the Reagan Era. There was no checking of facts: they went entirely by the press release. We entered the Third Age when Bill Clinton came under attack. That Age ended when the absurdity of pursuing a president on account of a blow job shook most of the American public.

The Fourth and Present Age is that of complete co-optation. The previous age featured a blind obedience to the findings of a tiny cabal of Clinton-haters who went to extremes to create a crime. Without checking their facts, journalists printed slanders such as a list of people “killed by Clinton”. When Bush came to power and made noises about WMDs in Iraq, commentators such as Thomas Friedman went along with the deception instead of investigating what was actually happening. We came to the age of “Fair and Balanced” which means to give equal time to discredited and unsupported points of view, especially if they come from the Right Wing.

Cushy as they are with the negligent powers of this world, it should come as no surprise to us that contemporary journalists sell out. Repeatedly. They’ve lost all sense of what it means to be an investigative reporter. Instead they’ve become press agents for the Bush Administration and the Republican Party.

This is why I oppose shield laws: they put the government in the business of protecting its own shills. As FAIR concludes:

There is much that is inexplicable and contradictory in Miller’s account of her behavior. But even taking her story at face value, she is a reporter who violated the standards of professional journalism to work with a top White House official to get revenge on a government critic–and then declined to testify to protect him from the criminal consequences of his lies. This context has an obvious bearing on Miller’s qualifications for an award celebrating freedom of expression.

That’s simply not worth protecting.