Media News

A DC appeals court Tuesday rejected the pleas of two reporters, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Judith Miller of the New York Times, who were contesting grand jury subpoenas requiring them to reveal confidential sources. The subpoenas are part of an ongoing investigation to determine who leaked the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame to syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who publicly outed Plame as a CIA operative. Both reporters received leaked information similar to Novak's, though Miller did not write about it and Cooper only referred to it in an article after Novak's column had appeared.

MB's David Hirschman spoke to both Cooper and Miller today to get their reaction to the decision, and both were willing to face up to 18 months in prison to protect the identities of their sources.

"What is the alternative?" asked Miller rhetorically of the possibility of jail. "To go in and talk? I'm not going to do that. There's not much choice. If it comes to prison, I'm going to have to do it. I don't want to do it. My family doesn't want it. But what choice do I have?"

Cooper said that he was taking a "one day at a time" approach, focusing on the legal process instead of the prospect of prison time, but that the principle of maintaining confidentiality was too important to sacrifice.

"Journalists, we believe, have the privilege and the duty to protect their confidential sources," said Cooper, "This is not an exotic privilege. It's one that is the law in 31 states and we believe it's there in Federal law as well."

Cooper said that, as a reporter covering the White House, there would be very little he would be able to write about if he were unable to protect his sources, as most of the crucial information is obtained off the record.

"You would reprint a lot of government press releases," he said, "but you would not really be able to find out what was really going on behind the scenes without being able to give people confidence and have them assured that you take their confidence seriously enough to go through the court system."

Miller agreed and said that she would be virtually unable to do her job without the ability to protect confidential sources.

"People who work in the national security and intelligence area of reporting cannot function without confidential sources," said Miller. "How would we ever know what was going on? From Pentagon and National Security Council briefings? I don't think so. This work is so hard to do, and since 9/11 it has become dramatically more difficult to do. There is a growing body of information that is secret. You used to be able to talk about information that was sensitive, but not secret. Now, so much of that information has been moved into the secret category. The placement of wastebaskets at the
Department of Homeland Security is virtually a secret."

Neither reporter professed to having a beef with Robert Novak, whose status in the proceedings remains a bit of a mystery, but Miller said she wished other reporters had done a better job rallying around Novak when the leak first broke.

"A lot of people who disagree with Bob Novak politically didn't feel like defending him," said Miller. "But the fact of the matter is that in leak investigations like this we're all vulnerable, and an attack on one should be an attack on all."

Miller said she didn't feel she and Cooper were being targeted unfairly, but she found it curious why the prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, had chosen to go after only them and not other journalists who had received subpoenas.

"He was a very aggressive prosecutor against Al Qaeda, and I was an admirer of the zeal with which he went after Al Qaeda," said Miller. "I wish he would continue to do that instead of targeting journalists."

But according to Miller, who seemed resigned to the fact that Fitzgerald would continue to pursue her, even 18 months in prison isn't the end of the world.

"I sometimes say to my friends and family 'there are worse places,'" she said. "There was Iraq for 5 months. There was Afghanistan, tooling around the country with Massoud, who got killed shortly before 9/11, in a 1970s vintage Soviet helicopter, the kinds of which crash with disturbing regularity. I was in Beirut with people shooting at me. I mean it's not pleasant—it's not what I was planning for the next two years—but it's not a terminal illness."