by William Powers

Mirror, Mirror

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Why can't the media just get over themselves? If you've been following the coverage of the Scooter Libby trial, you know that a hefty chunk of it has been about the role journalists are playing in and around the courtroom. This makes perfect sense, given that various reporters and columnists are central to the substance of the case against Libby, not to mention Libby's own I-heard-it-from-Tim-Russert defense.

What doesn't make sense is the way some news outlets have been framing the media's involvement. Two strains are particularly annoying. First is the purported postmodern weirdness of reporters becoming part of the story. For instance, this week The Washington Post offered up a story headlined "The Big Uneasy: Insiders, Media Mingle Awkwardly at Libby Trial." The piece noted that "in this slice of Washington, courtroom spectators, witnesses, lawyers—even the judge—have been the subjects, sources, or authors of interconnected news stories," and that "the trial sometimes provides 'Alice in Wonderland' moments."

The second motif is the idea that the Libby case is bad for journalism, because it exposes journalists for the schmoozy, ruthless operators that they are. In the lead-up to the trial, Newsweek's Howard Fineman said on MSNBC's Hardball that the trial "is not a good thing for the press in this country, in my view. It's going to lay out all kinds of details about how things work that are not necessarily going to be ennobling or helpful to us in the future."

Jane Hall, a professor of communications at American University, said this week on Fox News, "This is the dirty little secret, I think, of this story.... You get to a certain level and the White House press secretary is trying to leak to the reporter from the network or from The New York Times. People are using each other to leak, to do all kinds of things."

Really? Since when is it a secret that people in Washington "are using each other" or that the White House tries to leak stories to promote its interests? Welcome to the 19th century. Nor is it particularly strange that reporters and officials who figure in "interconnected news stories" should run into each other in court—Washington has always been a pretty small place.

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