No Lesser Evil
Lee sued the federal government on the curious grounds that its disclosures to reporters violated his privacy. Reporters for the Times, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and ABC were subpoenaed and asked to turn over the names of the sources he thought had abused him, and when the reporters refused to cooperate a federal judge found them in contempt of court and threatened them with fines of $500 a day. The D.C. circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals also ruled against the reporters, and though their attorneys petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case, they cut a deal with Lee’s attorneys and the government’s. Lee got $895,000 from the federal government and a total of $750,000 from the five media companies, which in turn got Lee’s guarantee that he wouldn’t sue them next (though the statute of limitations pretty much ruled out that possibility anyway). The media companies got to say they’d protected their reporters from stiff fines and possible jail and their sources from exposure, and had also denied the Supreme Court an opportunity to issue some sort of draconian edict reducing the media’s right to protect sources to roughly zero.
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In the Lee case the media faced a nightmarish choice. Since there’s no federal shield law–and might never be–that choice will have to be made time and again. Journalists should consider that sometimes the right choice might be simply to obey the bench. Obey, and hope the public and its politicians slowly get a glimmer of what this obedience is costing them in untold stories. The Lee settlement was a low point–journalism climbing into strange beds to preserve its virtue.
Later that day a James O’Toole e-mailed me. “Here’s a conundrum,” he said. “Liberal Chicago Sun-Times cartoonist bases a scathing editorial cartoon condemning U.S. Marines on a photo which actually depicts the slaughter of 19 fishermen in Iraq by insurgents. Will liberal Reader columnist ignore bogus cartoon?”
O’Toole and Michael Y. would stand on firmer ground if Huntley’s admission somehow proved that the slaughter by U.S. marines had never happened. It didn’t. Higgins’s point survives the way he made it. It isn’t bogus.
