[
reprinted , with edits, from
Southpaw, home of liberal Texans and other impossibilities]
Last night, SusanG lectured those who applauded the jailing of Judith Miller with this story of journalistic cowardice at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. (Note that she since has acknowledged that the situation is not necessarily as simple as it originally seemed to her.) I think she got it wrong here, and that generally the hysteria among media types about the precedent set by Miller's lack of journalistic shield is ill-placed.
What is a reporter, anyway?
(more below the fold)
No administration has brought the definition of "reporter" into question the way the Bushies have, with their invention of Jeff Gannon and outright purchase of folks like Armstrong Williams. If Gannon were the one in Miller's position in
L'affaire Plame, would we even be having this discussion? Where, exactly, is the borderline between "propagandist" and "reporter?"
This question is key to understanding what's really going on here. Reporters enjoy certain shield privileges because their job demands a certain antagonism with power. To shine the light on misdeeds of the powerful, they need sources willing to come forward if their identities can be concealed. This is all easily understood and really beyond dispute among people who love democracy.
A propagandist, though, doesn't challenge power; he collaborates with it. This is a fundamentally different dynamic -- a fundamentally different job, even if both the propagandist and the journalist get front page column inches under their name in the New York Times. It's this collaboration with the powerful to extend and abuse that power that neuters any claim Judy Miller may make to journalistic privilege. She is no journalist in the first place, and hasn't been in many years. She's not even a hack journalist. She's purely a propagandist, a willing and knowledgable participant in disinformation and smear campaigns for over twenty years. The only thing separating Miller from Gannon is that she didn't have to post nude pictures of herself online to whore herself out. That's all.
Journalists who lament the possible precedent set by Judy Miller's jailing need to put the entire profession up to the mirror and ask why, when whores like Miller, Gannon and Williams were selling out the integrity of their profession, journalists everywhere just went on about their business as though none of that had any impact on them. Reporters must vigilantly protect their status as guardians of the truth; when they let their would-be brethren walk all over that as they cozy up to power, it leads to breakdowns like this. Real journalists should have ostracized Judy Miller from the brother/sisterhood years ago. Now they, and all of us, pay the price for their casually looking the other way.