I think that criticism is fundamentally unfair, and probably based more on ideology than on the facts of the story. Scherer's piece in particular straightforwardly addressed the ironies of Miller's current role, and her past as a mouthpiece for Chalabi and, in effect, for the Bush administration's WMD disinformation. If the reporter going to prison had been freelancer Greg Palast, who has argued that Bush stole the 2004 election, or former Salon reporter Eric Boehlert, who has written extensively about the mainstream media's weak-kneed response to the White House, those same "sentimental details" might have brought our Washington reader to tears.

But I do think that the tide of powerful reader emotion we've seen at Salon, even though it's impelled by the Manichaean political climate of the moment, stems from a legitimate source. Journalism as a profession -- if, that is, it can even be described as a profession -- is facing a crisis of public confidence, and the wounds are partly self-inflicted. Scherer referred to the recent opinion poll that discovered "as many Americans consider Rush Limbaugh a journalist as Bob Woodward." Manjoo quoted Burton Glass, of the Center for Investigative Reporting, who explained that reporters "who in the past were seen as stewards of the public interest now are seen as the enemy or as part of the problem. If the public doesn't see the connection between protecting anonymous sources ... and their own public interest, I think our democracy is weakened."

On one hand, many members of the public -- especially liberals who ought to be staunch defenders of the Bill of Rights -- seem unable or unwilling to grasp the idea that a matter of fundamental principle might be at stake, even in the murky and seemingly bottomless waters of the Miller-Plame-Rove affair. Compelling a reporter to reveal his or her sources to the police turns that reporter into a police agent, and that's not acceptable, even in unsavory circumstances like these. No reporter can be expected to check out the legality or ethics or motivations of all sources in advance. All sorts of surprising people talk to reporters when they probably shouldn't, for all sorts of personal and political and psychological reasons. If journalists can only receive confidential information from the saintly and the pure of heart, the entire enterprise might as well become "The View."

It's worth suggesting that Judy Miller might be the Skokie case of press-freedom issues. It was back in 1977 when a small band of neo-Nazis from the South Side of Chicago launched a year-long legal battle by applying for a permit to march in Skokie, Ill., a suburban community with a majority Jewish population and a large number of Holocaust survivors. The neo-Nazis were a pack of losers with no coherent political ideology and little message beyond hate speech; their proposal to march in Skokie was pure provocation. But the various ordinances Skokie officials passed to try to stop the march were transparently unconstitutional, and the ACLU took the Nazis' case all the way to the Supreme Court, winning at every stage. Jewish members of the civil liberties group resigned by the thousands -- nationally, the ACLU lost 15 percent of its membership -- and some tension between Jewish organizations and the ACLU lingers to this day.

It should go without saying that for civil-liberties advocates and constitutional scholars, the issue was never whether the Nazis were repugnant (they were) or had anything to say (they didn't). Instead, it was a question of what legal precedent was being set. "If we had lost, a brand new set of First Amendment law would have been created," David Hamlin, then the executive director of the Illinois ACLU, said a few years later. "Any community in the country would have had the legal power to pass laws like Skokie's that would stifle not just Nazis but anyone they didn't like."

There's no need to draw the parallel out further, except to observe that the principle here is not approximately the same, but exactly the same. Even if you believe that Judith Miller is nothing more than "a shill for the Bush administration" (a Florida reader) or "a co-conspirator in a government coverup" (a Missouri reader), she's still entitled to the same constitutional protections as Greg Palast and Amy Goodman. Even, God help us, as Robert Novak, who seems to have peed his drawers and spilled the beans the moment the independent prosecutor rattled his cage. The First Amendment covers all members of the press, without regard to truthfulness, integrity or their perceived similarity to sub-reptilian life forms.

Recent Stories