Lancing The Boil

During the trial of Scooter "I. Lewis" Libby, the notes of Cathie Martin were flashed up on a courtroom screen. Martin was an aide to Vice President Darth Vader, I mean Dick Cheney, and her notes concerned ways in which Cheney might combat the notion that the White House had not been honest about Iraq's nuclear capabilities. As option number one, Martin wrote "MTP-VP," meaning either that the Vice President should aim his Death Star at some hapless planet and "massacre their people" or, more likely, that the Vice President should appear on the program you are not going to watch today.



Martin then did a pros and cons notation about this strategy. On the pro side she wrote "control message."



Really? That's the best thing about sending Vice President Cheney on "Meet the Press?" That you can control the message you want to get out? Interesting.



But then there were more notes presented at the trial. These notes were taken by Libby himself about a conversation he had with Cheney adviser Mary Matalin about how to deal with that meddlesome NBC fellow Chris Matthews. "Call Tim. He hates Chris - he needs to know it all," was the advice from Matalin jotted down by Libby.



Hmmm. A Cheney adviser knows that NBC's Russert hates NBC's Matthews and that Russert will be helpful.



A couple of connectable dots involve Matalin's husband, James Carville, and Russert's son, Luke, who together launched a satellite radio sports talk show called "60/20," a reference to their respective age groups, apparently because the title "A Giant Talking Adder and an Unqualified Stripling With a Famous Dad Discuss Big Strong Sweaty Men" was already taken by the Sci-Fi Channel.



Tim Russert and Carville actually promoted the sports show on "Meet the Press" (where Carville and Matalin regularly appear) without revealing that Luke Russert was the second host, as if that somehow removed the taint of hand-in-glove favoritism from this plug.



So Russert gets his kid a fancy gig with a famous and wired guy like Carville. It hardly comes as a surprise to think that Carville's wife feels she has a little inside advantage in playing Russert for Cheney's benefit.



But wait. There's more.



When Russert was first subpoenaed, in 2004, to speak to the grand jury in the Libby case, he and NBC made a great show of fighting to quash that subpoena because, in the words of NBC News president Neil Shapiro, "The American public will be deprived of important information if the government can freely question journalists about their efforts to gather news." This quote appeared in a "story" on the MSNBC website about NBC's brave resistance.



Stirring words. Only one problem. It emerged at trial that Russert spoke freely to an FBI agent about this whole matter the first time he was ever contacted. The whole pageant of refusing to cooperate was kind of a charade. He had already cooperated. I mean, shouldn't the story MSNBC ran about NBC's commitment to the American public have explained that Russert compromised at least some of that commitment the first chance he got?



OK. Just a little more.



In his own trial testimony, Russert explained his own unique approach to the concept of "off the record" conversations with public officials. Russert said public officials do not have to ask to go off the record with him. They are always presumptively off the record. Then, if he wants to get them on the record, he revisits the point and asks them to go public.



This is a wonderful, generous strategy, and the only problem with it is that it represents a complete inversion of the standard operating practices of journalism. Every reporter who works at this newspaper, and pretty much every reporter professionally employed at any other reputable organ of the press has been instructed to do the opposite: assume that every utterance is on the record unless the utterer has explicitly gone off the record before uttering.



People who deal with the press are expected to know that.



You're not even allowed to say, "The U.S. government blew up Pluto in November of last year, but that's off the record," although some reporters will give you the NBA continuation rule if you don't pause for breath anywhere in there.



A gray area would be something like, "The real Zodiac killer was - and this is off the record - Andy Rooney." That's probably a legitimate off the record statement.



But Russert's policy is one of his own invention, and it's the kind of policy you'd have if you prized your cozy relationship with powerful people more highly than you prized your role as a reporter.



I mention all this because, here and there, you read comments about the prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and how much he damaged the First Amendment by sweating a bunch of journalists. Please. It's more like he lanced some kind of infectious boil.

MS. PRIEST: Every time there’s a national security story they don’t want published, they say it will damage national security. But they—for one thing, they’ve never given us any proof. They say it will stop cooperation, but the fact is that the countries of the world understand that they have to cooperate on counterterrorism. And just like the banks that did not pull out of the system, other countries continue to cooperate, because it’s a common problem.



MS. MITCHELL: But, Dana...



MR. HARWOOD: Have you heard...(unintelligible)...are pulling out from this system? I don’t think so.



MS. MITCHELL: Dana, let me point out that The Washington Post, your newspaper, was behind the others but also did publish this story. And a story you wrote last year disclosing the secret CIA prisons won the Pulitzer Prize, but it also led to William Bennett, sitting here, saying that three reporters who won the Pulitzer Prize—you for that story and Jim Risen and others for another story—were, “not worthy of an award but rather worthy of jail.” Dana, how do you plead?



MS. PRIEST: Well, it’s not a crime to publish classified information. And this is one of the things Mr. Bennett keeps telling people that it is. But, in fact, there are some narrow categories of information you can’t publish, certain signals, communications, intelligence, the names of covert operatives and nuclear secrets.



Now why isn’t it a crime? I mean, some people would like to make casino gambling a crime, but it is not a crime. Why isn’t it not a crime? Because the framers of the Constitution wanted to protect the press so that they could perform a basic role in government oversight [emphasis mine], and you can’t do that. Look at the criticism that the press got after Iraq that we did not do our job on WMD. And that was all in a classified arena. To do a better job—and I believe that we should’ve done a better job—we would’ve again, found ourselves in the arena of...

thrown out of court on the merits

lie to the public