Reporters Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper are likely to go to jail for refusing to name sources in connection with the interminable investigation of the Plame kerfuffle.
Ms. Miller has said she will go to jail rather than testify. "Journalists simply cannot do their jobs without being able to commit to sources that they won't be identified," she said in a statement yesterday. "Such protection is critical to the free flow of information in a democracy." (Link)
How very noble of her. But there's a problem with unnamed sources:
A newspaper investigation of a former columnist for The Sacramento Bee could not verify 43 sources she used in a sampling of 12 years of her work.
Diana Griego Erwin resigned May 11 as she came under scrutiny about the existence of people she quoted. (Link)
Why should we trust the Millers and Coopers of the world when they claim they really do have unnamed sources and that those sources are credible?
Update: Slate's got another example, this time from a NY Time story on a lawsuit between Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema, arising out of how the latter handled sales of some Lord of the Rings products, which quotes a cheap shot by a unnamed individual identified only as a New Line lawyer. As Slate put it:
... shouldn't there be a Times policy against giving a partisan source, in this case a defense attorney, the cover of anonymity to call the plaintiff in a case against his client piggish? As a matter of fact, there is such a published policy limiting what anonymous sources can say in Times articles. In "Confidential News Sources," on the paper's corporate Web site, the policy reads in part:
We do not grant anonymity to people who use it as cover for a personal or partisan attack. If pejorative opinions are worth reporting and cannot be specifically attributed, they may be paraphrased or described after thorough discussion between writer and editor. The vivid language of direct quotation confers an unfair advantage on a speaker or writer who hides behind the newspaper, and turns of phrase are valueless to a reader who cannot assess the source.
Why did the Times violate its own policy in attacking Peter Jackson?
