[Mb-civic] Leak Riddle: Who's Playing Whom? - Mark Feldstein - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Leak Riddle: Who's Playing Whom?

By Mark Feldstein
Sunday, July 24, 2005; Page B01

Judith Miller, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter who 
now wears a brown and green prison jumpsuit, will soon enter her third 
week in a jail cell just a few miles from the White House where 
administration officials suspected of leaking classified information to 
journalists -- including the president's top political strategist, Karl 
Rove -- are still running the government.

Despite the widespread fixation on this political scandal, there is also 
an important journalistic one: the conflict of interest that reporters 
routinely have with high-level sources who leak sensitive information. 
It is the dirty little secret of the Washington press corps, a kind of 
unspoken conspiracy in which reporters conceal not only their sources' 
identities but more importantly the underlying motives for the leaks. 
This Faustian pact can be a disservice to the public, which learns only 
a part of the larger truth, a version that may be accurate as far as it 
goes but is by definition deficient.

<>I know. I've been an investigative reporter and received subpoenas in 
both criminal and civil cases that jeopardized my pledge of 
confidentiality to sources; once I even brought a packed suitcase into 
federal court in anticipation of going to jail. In the high-profile 
public corruption grand jury probes that I covered in Washington, some 
of my best sources publicly denied providing information that they had 
in fact leaked to me. This kind of disinformation is common and puts 
journalists in the awkward position of having to choose between 
reporting what they know is really going on or breaking their pledge of 
confidentiality to their sources.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/22/AR2005072202222.html?nav=hcmodule 

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