Contact:
Mag. My Hue McGowran
Phone: +43-1-81140-308
E-Mail: mcgowran@newsfox.com
| Pressbox | 
|
Washington (pte047/04.07.2005/16:52) - In an era - post 9/11 - during which official secrecy in the United States has reached an historic high, investigative journalism is now facing a potentially 'freedom-curtailing' defeat, says Reporters Without Borders http://www.rwf.org.
The current case involving Judith Miller of The New York Times and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper, which may see both land in jail for their unwillingness to reveal an anonymous source, is shocking US journalists and media watchdogs.
Although neither Miller nor Cooper actually made the US administration official who outed a CIA spy the centre of their work - Miller never wrote about it, and Cooper only mentioned it in passing - the US Supreme Court has charged them with contempt of court.
Newspapers and magazines are now arguing that to jail the two journalists would compromise the use of anonymous sources in investigative journalism, which is how previous government scandals such as Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, the secret record of the Vietnam War, were exposed.
The media world was disappointed and shocked last week when Cooper's employer Time Magazine handed over to the Supreme Court documents that revealed the name of the source. To ask journalists to breach confidentiality pacts with their sources puts journalism in peril, they say. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press called it a 'travesty', and Reporters Without Borders called the case 'retrograde and freedom-curtailing', a defeat for all media.
John Watson, assistant professor of journalism at American University, said that serious questions have been raised by the case.
"Yes, the sky is falling, but it falls every 25 to 30 years. We have learned to live with the collapsed sky on our heads," Watson said. "It doesn't spell an end to journalism functioning as it should. It is a serious crimp in press freedom, but we will survive."
Others, such as Aly Colon of the Poynter Institute http://www.poynter.org , said that the case should make journalists revise the idea of using unnamed sources. "The idea of offering confidentiality should be one that is very carefully considered; it should not be done with any regularity," he said.
Colon did say, however, that he thought it 'unfortunate' that Time had handed over the documents.
Editor in chief of Time Inc, Norman Pearlstine, explained the magazine's decision to produce the documents: "The same Constitution that protects the freedom of the press requires obedience to final decisions of the courts and respect for their rulings and judgments," he said. "That Time Inc. strongly disagrees with the courts provides no immunity."
(end)
|
|
