Consider (Exposing) the Source
It isn't as uncommon as Bush's media defenders would have you believe!
PLUS: What makes Krugman so darn good?
by Tamara Baker

Oct. 6, 2003 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (apj.us) -- This whole Bushistas' leaks hoo-ha -- WilsonGate, IntimiGate, whatever you choose to call it -- is somewhat farcial on its face.

We have the Bush White House and Justice Department sitting on an urgent CIA request for over two months, only to be prodded into action when the CIA's rank-and-filers, apparently disgusted at Tenet's letting the Bushies get away with burning an operative, her network of informants, and the front company for which she and several others were officially working, pressured Tenet to pull his spine out of the sock drawer and confront the Rove-Cheney axis.

We have the FBI re-directing the focus of the probe away from Bob Novak and the Bush team to look instead at the State Department and two Newsday journalists who weren't leakers, but whistleblowers.

We have a whole host of press persons wringing their hands over who the leakers could be, when most of them know full well who the leakers are -- and many of them were in fact among the original recipients of the Plame leak -- but won't tell us.

Why?

The official reason is a sort of professional courtesy: Journalists never, ever, EVER, we are told, reveal their sources.

So, even if it's to root out corruption and treason in the Bush Junta, they won't burn their Bushista sources.

Well, fine. Except that journalists do, indeed, reveal their sources on occasion.

Exhibit A was provided by none other than Newsweek's Jonathan Alter.

Writing this week , he states the following (thanks to Atrios for catching this, by the way):

Can I tell a quick leak story? The year was 1987 and Oliver North was testifying before a congressional committee investigating the Iran-contra affair. As I sat listening to him in the Senate Caucus Room, I couldn't believe my ears. North was talking about the 1985 apprehension of Arab terrorists who had tossed an elderly Jewish man in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer, over the side of the cruise ship Achille Lauro. The already famous Marine colonel was accusing members of Congress of being untrustworthy because they revealed the military details of that capture. I knew that North was shamelessly accusing other people of leaking something that he, in fact, had leaked himself -- not to me, but to other reporters. He was using confidentiality as a weapon. I decided to blow the whistle in NEWSWEEK and identify him as the source. This didn't exactly make me Mr. Popularity with my colleagues or with North, who threatened to sue. But I would do it all over again.

Alter goes on, much like Richard Cohen did earlier this week, to note that the real targets of the "fair and balanced" Ashcroft DoJ investigation seem to be, not the leakers, but the persons who blew the whistle on the leaking:

The investigators want information about any contacts between administration officials and Novak, and also with two other reporters: Timothy M. Phelps and Knut Royce of Newsday. Hmm ... Neither has been named as someone who received the original leak about Plame. Instead, Phelps and Royce had simply called around after Novak exposed Plame on July 14. They learned that she was, in fact, working undercover. By probing for contacts with Phelps and Royce, the Justice Department wants to find out who in the CIA confirmed this inconvenient fact that is causing the White House so much trouble. The real bad guy -- the one who blew Plame's cover -- is apparently of less interest. Otherwise, Justice wouldn't have waited months to investigate.

Now, you'd think that fellow reporters would of course leap to defend Newsday's Phelps and Royce, and rush to expose the real criminals here -- the leakers -- and so end this tawdry charade.

Buuuuuut nooooooooo, as Alter notes:

Reporters could help, of course. The premise behind their longstanding refusal to reveal their sources is that it would put them out of business. That might be true for a journalist who held a press conference to betray a source. But how about a reporter who secretly leaked the name of a source to another reporter, confident that no one would know where it came from? Almost all reporters still say no; it would feel scummy and violate the spirit of confidentiality. This is where I break ranks.

After all, don't we in the press routinely ask people in government and business to feel scummy and violate the spirit of confidentiality in their own institutions by leaking to us in the name of some higher public interest? Why shouldn't reporters themselves, on very rare occasions, leak in the same public interest, especially if their own identities can be protected? That is simply asking reporters to act in the same gabby way we expect of everyone else. If caught, the reporter who leaked would, indeed, weaken the special legal protections afforded journalists and jeopardize his or her own career. But the stakes are often just as high for any other leaker.

Now, this is pretty heavy stuff -- and a very good suggestion from Alter. I'm amazed that Alter, who is a Member in Good Standing of CelebCorps DC branch, has the cojones to type it.

I mean, normally he'd be busy trying to figure out a way to pin this all on the Clintons. And even now, he has to throw a sop to his fellow Heathers by making a few cheap flings against the Clintons as well as The Nation's David Corn, an APJ alumnus and the man who blew the whistle first and loudest on IntimiGate -- but who, you will note, is NOT being probed, probably because the Bushistas know that trying to cow him in this way is a waste of time and effort.

Speaking of the Clintons, that brings me to Exhibit B:

On the October 2, 2003 edition of PBS NewsHour, it was revealed by Bruce Yannet, who was himself part of the Independent Counsel team that probed Iran-Contra, that the reporters right to protect sources, even White House sources, is not carved in stone -- and that reporters were, in at least one high-profile case from the past few years, forced to divulge White House sources.

Check it out, here -- and here's the pertinent portion thereof:

BRUCE YANNETT: Yes, in fact, the regulations that Joe was just mentioning specifically say that the attorney general's approval is required before you go after a reporter's telephone logs. I just want to point out one thing if I might, which is that just a few years ago in the independent counsel investigation of Agricultural Secretary Mike Espy, the independent counsel actually did subpoena the records of "60 Minutes." "60 Minutes" went to court to try to stop it and the court ruled in favor of the independent counsel ordering "60 Minutes" to produce records so it does happen sometimes.

MARGARET WARNER: Did "60 Minutes" produce the records or did the people who had the records defy the order and go to prison?

BRUCE YANNETT: It's my understanding the records were produced.

So, reporters will expose White House sources, so long as the White House in question is occupied by a legitimately-elected Democratic president. (By the way: Mike Espy was later acquitted, but the damage was already done. By the time his name was cleared, he had lost his job as the first African-American chief of USDA.)

This all points to what I suspect is the real reason that CelebCorps won't burn their Bushista sources: They're afraid to burn the Bushies, and/or in cahoots with them. Take yer pick.

If you want to know why Paul Krugman is the best hire the New York Times has made in the past thirty years, you need to look no further than this passage in the introduction to his splendid new book, "The Great Unraveling":

I began pointing out the outrageous dishonesty of the Bush administration long before the rest of the punditocracy. Why did I see what others failed to see? One reason is that as a trained economist I wasn't even for a minute tempted to fall into the he- said-she-said style of reporting, under which opposing claims by politicians are given equal credence regardless of the facts.

Now hold it right there.

Krugman hits upon how the media, under the guise of "impartiality" but actually out of laziness, ignorance and/or a fear of offending the wrong people, lets the GOP get away, literally as is the case in Iraq, with murder. He sums up in a few expertly-chosen words what it would take me seven hundred words to say.

But that's not the end of it. Krugman describes how he, an Op-Ed guy who didn't need to hew to the standards of a journalist (and Lord knows Bill "I make it up and no one dares call me on it" Safire sure doesn't), did his own legwork and wouldn't just take the received wisdom from the Bushistas at face value:

I did my own arithmetic -- or, where necessary, got hold of real economists who could educate me on the subjects I wrote about -- and quickly realized that we were dealing with world-class mendacity, right here in the U.S.A. I wasn't entirely alone in this: one thing I've noticed the last few years is that business reporters, who know a bogus number when they see one, have often accused our leaders of outrageous mendacity even while political pundits celebrate these leaders for their supposed sterling character.

It's true. Besides the Krugster, the strongest US condemnation of Bush's policies has come, not from the mainstream dailies, but from the pages of mags like Business Week and Barron's and even Fortune. (The Wall Street Journal would be among these luminaries, but even their own top-class news room has been hobbled of late by the half-baked right-wing nutcases in the editorial section.)

None of these magazines are run by wild-eyed Socialists -- but they're not run by wild-eyed scam artists, either. And they resent the idea that, thanks to George W. Bush and his buddies at Halliburton, Enron and Edison, Americans from this day forward will believe that the only way to succeed in the business world is to be a lying, cheating sack of human fertilizer. In fact, real business experts despise the headlines-grabbing scam artists that hollow out their companies like maggots despoiling a body.

Unfortunately, most Americans don't read the financial sections of their own daily newspapers, much less subscribe to Business Week or Barron's. So they never see a strong, fact-based, numbers-grounded debunking of Bush's policies -- unless they are lucky enough either to read the New York Times, or to read a paper that runs a certain column from the Times.

That column, of course, is Paul Krugman's.

Krugman is quite literally one of the things standing between us and total oncological Gilded-Age corruption and barbarism. For that reason, he is under attack as is no other American writer.

Even as his fellow Op-Edder Safire is allowed to state the most bizarre and improvable tripe, Krugman must mind his Ps and Qs more carefully than any NYT journalist ever has -- even though, as I mentioned earlier, Op-Ed columnists aren't supposed to have to hew to the same standards as regular journalists. Witness how the NYT raked Krugman over the coals last year concerning his citing a Jason Leopold story in Salon -- even as they continued to ignore Safire's various crimes against journalism. If I could name any one incident to show that, far from being liberally-biased, the American media in fact kowtows to the right wing, this incident would be it.

You know what to do, everyone. Go buy Paul's book. You'll be doing him, and all of us, a big favor.