D.C. Dispatch July 12, 2005

The court ruling against Judith Miller shouldn't prompt the press to declare the end of free journalism in America, as so many media crape-hangers are eager to do.

The Gloom Gang

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It's been a miserable few weeks in the media. Time Inc. Editor-in-Chief Norman Pearlstine gave in to a special prosecutor's subpoena and handed over a reporter's notes and e-mails relating to the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Even this extraordinary capitulation wasn't enough to satisfy the relentless prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, who was threatening both the Time reporter, Matthew Cooper, and Judith Miller of The New York Times with imprisonment if they continued refusing to testify. Cooper relented when his anonymous source freed him from his commitment to keep the source's identity secret. Miller, on Wednesday, was jailed.

Lousy stuff. But then, every moment of every day is lousy in media-land. Or so the coverage of journalism's woes would lead you to believe. There's a sky-is-falling quality to the media's conversation about their own troubles. Each new blow is trotted out as proof that the nightmare can only get worse: the plagiarism and inaccurate reporting; the evidence that newspapers and other old media are losing audience; and now the spectacle of two reporters facing imprisonment for doing their jobs.

"It's a tough time to be a journalist," Bob Steele, a journalism scholar at the Poynter Institute in Florida, told The Wall Street Journal.

It's enough to make a media wretch want to end it all right now, jump off the nearest bridge—or join the nearest PR firm.

But are things really so bad? I think there's a lot of evidence that the doomsayers are falling into the old journalistic trap of accentuating the negative. Yes, it's horrific to think of a reporter going to jail for an act—the blowing of Plame's cover—that she didn't commit (it was syndicated columnist Robert Novak who did that).

In a reasonable world, this wouldn't happen. But let's not make the mistake of declaring the end of free journalism in America, as the media crapehangers are eager to do.

Instead, let's remember first that this case is not representative of much of anything beyond itself. Indeed, news outlets covering it have made much of the patent absurdity, the down-the-rabbit-hole madness of the Plame saga. Nobody is even sure what Fitzgerald's quest is all about. "He has never publicly disclosed, even to the two reporters and their attorneys, why he needs their notes," The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. "It may be that he too has concluded that talking to the press is no crime, in which case he may by now only be pursuing a perjury rap against the leaker. If that's true, Mr. Fitzgerald will have earned a place in the Overzealous Hall of Fame."

This is a maddeningly impenetrable story, difficult to translate into layman's terms. Yet, as the above passage and countless other editorials and stories demonstrate, the media have done so with great lucidity, subtlety, and evenhandedness. If you want proof that a vigorously intelligent free press is alive and well in this country, look no further than the coverage of the very story media folk are currently using to bludgeon themselves. We bemoan our own travails on the one hand, while on the other we effectively show that things are not half as bad as we like to pretend.

Media bias is the fashionable issue of the hour, yet this story has been remarkable for its lack of a discernible media party line. For every news outlet portraying Pearlstine as a sellout, there's been another saying, wait a minute, it's more complicated than that. The news trade really has no incentive to give the pro-Pearlstine position a fair shake, yet it has done so, in spades. The New York Times, whose publisher made the opposite choice, went to great lengths to chronicle exactly how the Time Inc. chief "made a difficult decision his own." The Times' Pearlstine piece, by Lorne Manly and David D. Kirkpatrick, was so sensitive and nuanced, you couldn't help but come away from it admiring Pearlstine's conscientiousness, if not his final choice.

Sure, the bellyachers are having a ball making fun of the media's summer obsession with missing white women. But at the same time, we're having one heck of a serious conversation about the meaning of the First Amendment. A shoddy, decadent press wouldn't—couldn't—do this kind of thing.

In fact, the idea that everyone just loathes the press, widely circulated by the press itself, is coming into serious question lately. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed that an increasing number of Americans believe the media are politically biased. There's your Chicken Little headline. But the same poll also revealed that newspapers and other news outlets are still viewed favorably by a great majority of the public: "In fact," Pew reported, "the favorable ratings for most categories of news organizations surpass positive ratings for President Bush and major political institutions—the Supreme Court, Congress, and the two major political parties."

In another poll, which will be released later this month, the American Journalism Review and the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center found "strong public support for the use of anonymous sources," according to Rem Rieder, editor of AJR.

Imagine that. No question the media are in an ugly patch. But don't believe the obits they're writing about themselves. They're just being journalists.

William Powers is a columnist for National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.