Center for Citizen Media Rotating Header Image

Wrapped in First Amendment, Protecting a Sleazebag

Slate’s Jack Shafer tries to unravel “The BALCO mess or travels in the gray areas of confidential source arrangement,” and writes of the San Francisco Chronicle reporters whose source for grand-jury minutes turned out to be a defense attorney:

Having found their leaker, the feds dropped the subpoena against the reporters. But a number of journalists, lawyers, and ethicists in the First Amendment Industrial Complex weren’t happy to learn that Williams and Fainaru-Ward weren’t the free-speech martyrs they imagined them to be.

First, a disclosure: I’m on the board of the California First Amendment Coalition, which has taken a stance defending the reporters. I was never entirely comfortable with this, but the federal government’s efforts were beyond heavy-handed. On balance, I agreed that the threat to journalism was substantial.

Now that we know who the leaker is — and that this soon-to-be-jailed lawyer publicly said the case against his clients should be dropped because the leaks had poisoned the jury pool — the Chronicle’s actions look a whole lot less noble. The paper is getting hammered by readers and critics, and I agree with some of the critics.

The newspaper not only got in bed with someone it knew to have an agenda readers would have found highly relevant — totally undisclosed, of course, by the paper — but it stayed silent when that person used the media to lie through his teeth. There’s no moral ambiguity; what the Chronicle did, by omission, was wrong.

There should be plenty of soul-searching going on inside the Chronicle right now. Sadly, if this story in Editor & Publisher is any indication, nothing of the kind seems to be happening.

1 Comment on “Wrapped in First Amendment, Protecting a Sleazebag”

  1. #1 Seth Finkelstein
    on Feb 21st, 2007 at 9:44 am

    “this soon-to-be-jailed lawyer publicly said the case against his clients should be dropped because the leaks had poisoned the jury pool –”

    I think we have a new definition of chutzpah.

    What he should have done is created an anonymous blog.

    Then he could have “played” bloggers too, and presented it as a fight about Internet free speech as well.