Howard Kurtz's Media Notes is the place to follow Wilsongate.
The Indiana man who fired off an e-mail yesterday to CNN, where columnist Robert Novak works as the co-host of 'Crossfire,' didn't pull any punches:
"Robert Novak is guilty of publicly exposing the identity of a CIA agent. He has committed a crime and should be arrested immediately. Just because he is a journalist doesn't give him the right to break our laws."
In fact, Novak committed no crime in revealing, based on information from "two senior administration officials," that the wife of a prominent critic of President Bush's Iraq policy worked for the CIA. Journalists are not covered by the law barring the release of such information. But his role in outing the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson has unleashed a torrent of criticism against the media for protecting unnamed officials who put out damaging information
[...]
Novak, for his part, was engaged in a transaction -- accepting information in exchange for a promise of confidentiality -- that occurs around the clock in the news business, especially in the whispering world of Washington. By doing so, journalists sometimes put themselves in a box, unable to reveal who handed them information even when that information becomes radioactive or an investigation is launched. During the Clinton impeachment, for example, major news organizations reported on a probe into leaks by then-independent counsel Ken Starr and his aides, even though their own reporters knew the source of those leaks because they had obtained the information.
"This is the dilemma journalists often get caught upon, particularly those spoon-fed leaks of this sort," said David Corn, Washington bureau chief of the Nation and one of the few reporters to criticize Novak's column at the time. Novak, said Corn, "was the vehicle" for a "quite ugly and brutal act" by the administration leakers.
The question Novak should have asked, said Corn, is whether "the story was the White House trying to smear Joe Wilson and damage his career, or was the story that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA?"
Alex Jones, director of Harvard's Shorenstein press center, said: "I don't think it's okay to leak a secret, and this is a genuine secret. I think the media shames itself when it publishes a legitimate military or national security secret. Publishing this information was a mistake. At the same time, I believe in protecting leakers" because they often give the press vital information that government would suppress to avoid embarrassment.
A half-dozen other journalists were given the same information about Wilson's wife by administration officials but declined to publish it. One exception was Time magazine, which posted the information on its Web site in July as part of a piece questioning whether the White House was waging bureaucratic war against Wilson.
Time Managing Editor Jim Kelly said that "the Novak story is what put this whole thing in play." He said Time would protect its confidential sources, adding: "Every day good reporters are getting information they really shouldn't be getting, whether it's grand jury testimony or congressional documents."
Novak said yesterday that he would not name the senior administration officials who told him about Plame's CIA connection.
"That is part of the journalist's code," he said. "If I were to reveal the sources, I would leave journalism."
There would be plenty of folks that would happily say good riddance; there would also be plenty of floks who would ask: When was Novak ever injournalism?
