FAIR Calls for Revealing Sources in Plame, Lee Cases

[Rose Siding]

FAIR Calls for Revealing Sources in Plame, Lee Cases - Courts should Respect Anonymity of Genuine Whistle-blowers

NEW YORK - August 19 - FAIR, the national media watch group, encourages the reporters and news outlets who have been asked to reveal their sources in the Valerie Plame and Wen Ho Lee cases to cooperate with investigators. Protecting the identities of confidential sources is a journalistic right that should be recognized by the courts, but only when it protects genuine whistle-blowers, not when it shields government wrongdoing.

Plame is the covert CIA officer whose identity was apparently leaked after her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, charged the Bush administration with misuse of intelligence. Lee was a scientist falsely charged by the Clinton administration with being a Chinese spy, and officials seem to have leaked selective information about him in an effort to discredit him in the press.

Reporters in both cases are being told by investigators to reveal the specific members of the government who transmitted information. FAIR believes that prosecutors' attempts to discover these sources is legitimate, and the ethical journalistic choice is to assist their efforts.

The ability to protect confidential sources who reveal government wrongdoing is an important journalistic protection that deserves judicial respect. In both the Plame and Lee cases, however, the journalist's sources were not revealing government wrongdoing, but committing government wrongdoing.

http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/0819-06.htm

[rucky]

1. Alright you Novak defenders...

reconsider now?