[Note: I've given up my own personal blog for the summer while I'm
on the road, so I'm posting this diary here, mainly so I can remember my thinking.]
Just watching SF Chronicle publisher make a direct comparison between the Plame investigation and Judith Miller getting jail time and the recent emergence of Mark Felt as the identity of Deep Throat.
I can sort of see his point in light of the beating Felt took from the Republican Noise Machine when he emerged, but in real terms it seems like the two cases are light night and day.
Watergate was about the exposure of massive corruption within the Nixon administration. This exposure was right, good, and even heroic given the circumstances.
The Plame case is about the felonious revelation of a CIA asset's identity, an act of politically motivated revenge designed to strike back and discredit the work of the asset's spouse who was a critic of the Bush Administration's march to war. The reporters who are under the gun here are standing in the way of a grand jury investigation into this felonious act of political revenge.
To stack the two up side by side and say they are both about the government's desire to "keep things secret," as the editor repeatedly did, ignores the question as to the the role which journalism is playing here.
In this instance, the journalists in question were almost certainly manipulated by someone within the Bush administration, and it is the investigation of this injustice which has placed Mr. Cooper and Ms. Miller in hot water. While there is a journalistic principle in play, I don't think anyone can fairly claim that this case represents a watershed moment in the government's ability to regulate the press, and to have a newspaper editor get up and compare Judith Miller's jail time to reporters being killed for exposing the truth under dictatorial regimes is patently hyperbolic and obscures what's really at issue.
What this case does represent -- to me anyway -- is a another step down the road towards obselesence. This isn't about the government regulating the press or punishing journalists, it's about the Bush administration's total superiority in the game of information warfare. In defying the Grand Jury, these reporters are not "standing up to the government in the name of journalistic principle," they are being manipulated to serve the ends of the Bush administration. Their inability to look past the very personal particulars of the story and see the context which surrponds them has transformed these human beings from truth-seeking reporters to political pawns.