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Personal fouls

Media -- Dont Quote Me

Taking stock of an imperiled free press

Judith Miller

The first installment, which will air locally on WGBH-TV (Channel 2) at 9 pm, on February 13, focuses on the Valerie Plame affair and its implications for reporters’ ability to protect their sources. Here’s the gist: when the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time, who were contesting special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s request that they testify in the Plame case, it toppled a precarious tradition of reporter-source confidentiality in one fell swoop.

That story alone is worth telling — but the first episode of News War also offers a searing indictment of the complicity of the press in the run-up to the Iraq War. The highlight, if that’s the right term, is this exchange between Frontline’s Lowell Bergman and the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, which starts with Woodward condemning Miller’s now-discredited reporting on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

WOODWARD: She had the wrong sources. . . . If your sources are wrong, you’re wrong. And you have to accept responsibility.
BERGMAN: You believed there was WMD in Iraq.
WOODWARD: I did.
BERGMAN: You said as much publicly.
WOODWARD: Yes.
Cue tape of Larry King interviewing Woodward prior to the invasion.
CALLER: What happens if we go to war against Iraq and we knock ’em right out, and we find no weapons of mass destruction?
WOODWARD: I think the chance of that happening is about zero. There’s just too much there.

If you’re looking for journalistic heroes, they’re hard to come by here. But that doesn’t render the government’s increasing aggression toward the press any less troubling. Watch, and be dismayed.

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