Media Nation

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, at his news conference yesterday, said that the reason Lewis “Scooter” Libby isn’t being charged directly with exposing Valerie Plame’s status as an undercover CIA operative is that Libby’s alleged lies may have made it impossible to get at the truth.

In his careful way, Fitzgerald said that Libby’s truthful testimony might not have led to his being charged in blowing Plame’s cover — but that, on the other hand, maybe it would have. The relevant excerpt:

FITZGERALD [note: earlier I nonsensically attributed these remarks to “LIBBY”]: Let’s not presume that Mr. Libby is guilty. But let’s assume, for the moment, that the allegations in the indictment are true. If that is true, you cannot figure out the right judgment to make, whether or not you should charge someone with a serious national security crime or walk away from it or recommend any other course of action, if you don’t know the truth.

So I understand your question which is: Well, what if he had told the truth, what would you have done? If he had told the truth, we would have made the judgment based upon those facts. We would have assessed what the accurate information and made a decision.

We have not charged him with a crime. I’m not making an allegation that he violated that statute. What I’m simply saying is one of the harms in obstruction is that you don’t have a clear view of what should be done. And that’s why people ought to walk in, got into the grand jury, you’re going to take an oath, tell us the who, what, when, where and why — straight.

Naturally, the Wall Street Journal editorial page blows right past that distinction with a headline that reads, “Obstruction for What? Libby is charged with lying about a crime that wasn’t committed.” Here’s the lead:

WSJ: Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation took nearly two years, sent a reporter to jail, cost millions of dollars, and preoccupied some of the White House’s senior officials. The fruit it has now borne is the five-count indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the Vice President’s Chief of Staff — not for leaking the name of Valerie Plame to Robert Novak, which started this entire “scandal,” but for contradictions between his testimony and the testimony of two or three reporters about what he told them, when he told them, and what words he used.

Given Fitzgerald’s clear statement that Libby’s alleged lies made it impossible to determine whether or not a larger crime had been committed, the Journal editorial amounts to journalistic malpractice. Are you surprised?

Yesterday’s indictment of Lewis “Scooter” Libby could prove to be a dark day for any notion that reporters have a right to protect their confidential sources.

That right — never fully recognized, although the Supreme Court’s Branzburg v. Hayes (1972) decision led to some limited protections — had already been under assault as never before. Jim Taricani of WJAR-TV (Channel 10) in Providence was sentenced to house arrest last year for refusing to divulge who had given him an undercover FBI videotape of a city official accepting a bribe. And, of course, Judith Miller of the New York Times recently served 85 days in jail rather than talk about her conversations with Libby.

The problem now is that journalists, having already identified Libby as the alleged bad guy in the Valerie Plame investigation, will become the star witnesses against Libby if and when the case goes to trial. Bob Zelnick of Boston University raised this point last night on “Beat the Press,” the weekly media roundtable that’s part of WGBH-TV/Channel 2’s “Greater Boston.” Zelnick noted that, inevitably, Miller, NBC’s Tim Russert and Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper will all have to take the stand and testify against their once-confidential source — a pretty unappetizing prospect.

This morning, Katharine Seelye and Adam Liptak expand on that in the Times. Some excerpts:

SEELYE AND LIPTAK: “This is exactly the thing,” said Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, “that journalists fear most – that they will become an investigative arm of the government and be forced to testify against the sources they’ve cultivated.”
…
Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment lawyer, said he could not recall a previous case that depended so heavily on testimony by reporters or in which reporters could be so exposed.

“It’s troubling that reporters are being asked to play so central a role, but even more troubling that reporters may be obliged to play the role of testifying against someone that they had promised confidentiality to,” said Mr. Abrams, who has at various times represented The New York Times, Time, Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper.
…
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the case was setting a dangerous precedent. “Reading the indictment makes my blood run cold,” she said. “This whole thing hinges on Russert.”

Indeed, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald might not even have a case were it not for Libby’s alleged lies about his exchange with Russert. Josh Marshall points to a National Review Online post that shows just how solid and serious the Russert matter is.

This has always been a lousy case for anyone who thinks there ought to be at least a limited reporter’s privilege. Washington reporters, compromised by the ways of Washington, claimed a reporter’s privilege not to protect a whistleblower or to expose government corruption (as Taricani did), but, rather, to maintain their promise of anonymity to a source or sources who may have outed an undercover CIA agent and thus undermined national security. I understand why they had to do that, but there’s nevertheless something unclean about it.

The media lovefest enveloping Fitzgerald is unwarranted. Fitzgerald does come across as admirably apolitical, a rare straight-shooter. But he also took advantage of the tattered fabric that was the reporter’s privilege and blasted an enormous hole right through it.

Short of a national shield law — something that seems unlikely to pass — the reporter’s privilege has now gone from tenuous to nonexistent. Perhaps some good will come out of this: A source will think very, very hard before he uses a reporter’s promise of anonymity to engage in criminal behavior.

More likely, though, Fitzgerald’s crusade will make it harder for journalists — and journalism — to expose the truth.

It’s not quite like getting George Foreman to put his name on a grille, but there is at least some commercial value in the indictment of former White House official Lewis “Scooter” Libby. From the indictment:

12. On or about June 19, 2003, an article appeared in The New Republic magazine online entitled “The First Casualty: The Selling of the Iraq War.” Among other things, the article questioned the “sixteen words” and stated that following a request for information from the Vice President, the CIA had asked an unnamed ambassador to travel to Niger to investigate allegations that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. The article included a quotation attributed to the unnamed ambassador alleging that administration officials “knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie.” The article also was critical of how the administration, including the Office of the Vice President, portrayed intelligence concerning Iraqi capabilities with regard to weapons of mass destruction, and accused the administration of suppressing dissent from the intelligence agencies on this topic.

13. Shortly after publication of the article in The New Republic, LIBBY spoke by telephone with his then Principal Deputy and discussed the article. That official asked LIBBY whether information about Wilson’s trip could be shared with the press to rebut the allegations that the Vice President had sent Wilson. LIBBY responded that there would be complications at the CIA in disclosing that information publicly, and that he could not discuss the matter on a non-secure telephone line.

Cruise on over to The New Republic’s Web site, and you’ll see that the very first item is “The TNR article cited in the Libby indictment.” The article, by John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman, was originally published in June 2003. It was a landmark (especially for a publication as pro-war as TNR had been), revealing in considerable detail the pressure that Dick Cheney and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration had put on the intelligence community to produce the rationale they needed to justify going to war.

Here’s the paragraph that presumably got Cheney and Libby going on their Wilson snipe hunt:

TNR: One year earlier, Cheney’s office had received from the British, via the Italians, documents purporting to show Iraq’s purchase of uranium from Niger. Cheney had given the information to the CIA, which in turn asked a prominent diplomat, who had served as ambassador to three African countries, to investigate. He returned after a visit to Niger in February 2002 and reported to the State Department and the CIA that the documents were forgeries. The CIA circulated the ambassador’s report to the vice president’s office, the ambassador confirms to TNR. But, after a British dossier was released in September detailing the purported uranium purchase, administration officials began citing it anyway, culminating in its inclusion in the State of the Union. “They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie,” the former ambassador tells TNR. “They were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes and added this to make their case more persuasive.”

You can read the article here, because TNR has departed from its usual practice and made the Judis-Ackerman piece freely available. After all, this a selling moment. What better come-on than the article that may have led Scooter Libby into a life of crime?

Take a look at how the Boston Globe’s series on the Massachusetts General Hospital ICU plays out online. The series, by writer Scott Allen and photographer Michele McDonald, delves deep into the training of an ICU nurse, Julia Zelixon, a Russian-Jewish immigrant. The online version has more photos (plus they look better), an interview with McDonald and Allen, a slide show narrated by Allen, and sound clips from Zelixon and her mentor, M.J. Pender.

An impressive effort, but also a fascinating take on what newspapers need to do if they want to survive.

I’ll keep this post short. After all, I wouldn’t want to exceed Metro Boston’s word count.

In the Phoenix, Mark Jurkowitz has a hilarious account of what happened when he set out to do what he had envisioned as a positive feature on Metro’s growing readership among young people and commuters.

In the Herald, Jay Fitzgerald reports on a new study that suggests the Metro business model isn’t working out particularly well. That’s of crucial interest to the Herald, since the New York Times Co., which owns the Globe, acquired 49 percent of the local Metro earlier this year.

No, not the buzz. Not this time.

I have a problem with the iTunes Music Store. It’s possible that it’s my fault, although what I’m about to describe is simple enough that I find it hard to believe I’m doing anything wrong. I may be a fool about some things, but this is pretty much a foolproof process. Or at least I thought it was.

I’ve been a happy iPod user for more than two years, ever since Mrs. Media Nation got me a 15 GB third-generation model for Father’s Day. The vast majority of the music on my iPod consists of my CDs, which I ripped to iTunes on my iBook. (The “i”s have it.) I don’t do anything fancy — I use the default setting, which is AAC compression at 128 kbps, the same compression that the iTunes Music Store uses.

My ripped CDs sound great on the iPod. I know the compression is supposed to degrade the sound quality slightly, but my 49-year-old ears certainly can’t tell.

Yet when I have used the iTunes Music Store, I’ve had mixed results. Some albums sound fine. Others don’t. Two examples: Miles Davis’ “Get Up With It,” supposedly remastered from the original 1975 release, and John Prine’s latest, “Fair and Square.” Parts of “Get Up With It” sound OK; others are fuzzy and distorted, as though it had been recorded on an analogue system with the volume set too high.

I own the vinyl version of “Get Up With It,” and though I haven’t done a direct comparison, I certainly listened to it enough when I was younger that I should have remembered the distortion. And, no, I’m not talking about John McLaughlin playing guitar with the distortion turned up. This is more elemental, embedded in the track.

With “Fair and Square,” the distortion is in the vocals. The problem is similar: it sounds as though someone set the volume too high when the recording was originally made. When Prine duets with a female singer on “Long Monday,” the effect is especially awful. (Overall, the sound seems a bit muddy, too.)

In my iTunes software, the Sound Enhancer bar is in the middle, but it’s not clicked on; that means I’ve got Sound Enhancer turned off, right?

Why am I telling you all this?

An unselfish reason: In the past, I’ve found that readers really seem to respond to tech posts. It’s a continuing obsession for a lot of us, and — really — how much media and politics can we take?

A selfish reason: I’d like some advice!

If you haven’t seen it yet, here is the link to former Colin Powell aide Lawrence Wilkerson’s blistering op-ed piece in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. Here is what he says about what he describes as the “cabal” led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

WILKERSON: Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This furtive process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and “guardians of the turf.”

But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well.

Last Friday, I participated in a panel on blogging and podcasting at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. One of the other participants, Christopher Lydon (link now fixed), was beside himself that Wilkerson’s speech before the New America Foundation earlier that week hadn’t gotten much coverage.

Lydon’s complaint was right on the mark. But sometimes stories disappear, and sometimes they seem to disappear, only to gain strength once people in the mainstream media start to recognize their importance. (The Valerie Plame investigation would be a good example of that.)

Wilkerson’s critique could fall into the latter category.

It’s obviously up to Condé Nast whether or not to make all New Yorker content freely available on the Web. But it borders on the abusive not to at least set up a password-protected system for those of us who subscribe to the print edition. The Atlantic Monthly and The New Republic don’t seem to have any problem doing that.

This is especially frustrating when the New Yorker has some hot content – as it does this week, in the form of Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with Brent Scowcroft, the Bush I national-security adviser turned Bush II Cheney-basher.

Uh, Mr. Newhouse, sir, it’s Wednesday, and my mail-carrier still hasn’t delivered this week’s issue. Could I at least read it online? Please?

Mark Jurkowitz, whom I replaced as the Boston Phoenix’s media columnist in 1994 — and who, in turn, replaced me when I left the Phoenix earlier this year — explains why he thought the Phoenix was a better outlet for his work than the Boston Globe. An excerpt:

JURKOWITZ: Everybody’s got a theory about how to fix the slumping newspaper business, which has the feel of a dying Rust Belt industry these days. First and foremost, print journalism has to remain reliable. But I believe it also needs to evolve to provide readers with more attititude and personality, a little more spit and vinegar and a little less perfunctory “he said, she said.” In the end, I figured that much of good media writing, like good sports writing, is about argument — starting arguments, making arguments, and occasionally even ending arguments. The alternative press is simply more conducive to arguing.

Among other things, Jurkowitz’s take on the importance of the alternative press is why you should be worried about this week’s news that the Phoenix-based New Times chain plans to merge with the Village Voice and its assorted weeklies. Tim Redmond of the San Francisco Bay Chronicle has a good analysis explaining why this merger should not pass antitrust muster.

The Association of Alternative Newsweeklies is tracking coverage of this disturbing, long-predicted development.

After I posted a link I’d found to Maureen Dowd’s tough column on Judith Miller yesterday, I was told that the progressive Web site TruthOut.org continues to post the full text of New York Times columns – the left-leaning ones, anyway.

Sure enough: Check out the right-hand column, headlined “Op-Editorials.” So much for TimesSelect. At the bottom of each piece is this: “In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.”

But that’s only part of the fair-use provision of copyright law. Generally speaking, you just can’t post entire articles, as the Free Republic discovered a few years ago. It seems significant that CommonDreams.org, whose mission is similar to TruthOut’s, has stopped carrying Times columns.

Still, until someone at the Times complains, it looks like TruthOut is a good place for bloggers seeking links to liberal Times columnists.

So what about Brooks and Tierney?