David Broder dose a nice editorial piece after he gets through...

[whistle]

...defending why the press should be allowed anonymous sources:

<snip>
Anonymous source, thy name is trouble
DAVID BRODER
David Broder is a syndicated columnist based at The Washington Post.
July 17, 2005

Many of us in journalism are upset that the public seems largely indifferent to the jailing of one reporter and the prosecutor's pursuit of several others in the leaking of CIA employee Valerie Plame's identity.

<snip>

But in the course of the investigation, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has gone after half a dozen other journalists who apparently were working on the Plame-Wilson story. One of them, the Times' Judith Miller, adamantly refused to go before the grand jury and was jailed on July 6 for contempt of court after losing all her legal claims to be allowed to protect her source....Other journalists have made her a heroine - someone who went to jail rather than break her promise - and they have castigated the prosecutor and judge for the harshness of the penalty, especially since Miller never wrote a story using whatever information she had gained.

But no one, not even Miller, is wholly praiseworthy. She is the same reporter who, in a series of influential articles before the war, vividly portrayed the threat that Saddam Hussein's weapons supposedly posed. Only afterward was it learned that many of her "scoops" came from Ahmed Chalabi, then a controversial Iraqi exile who had dreams of supplanting Saddam Hussein as Iraq's new ruler - with the support of a conquering American army. Her use of an unnamed source in that case was a distinct disservice to the country; had we known Chalabi's identity and motivation, much less credibility would have been attached to her reports.

Now, thanks to another reporter, Matt Cooper of Time magazine, we know that one White House official who was spreading the word about Plame and Wilson (but apparently describing their relationship without giving her name) was Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove. Despite earlier White House denials that he had anything to do with the case and a promise from the president to fire any leaker, Rove remains on the job as this is written.

The only lesson I can draw is that reporters ought to be very careful about accepting unattributed information. For every "Deep Throat," there are multiple Chalabis and Roves.

<more>
<link> http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-opbro174346284jul17,0,1417603.story?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines

[Skittles]

1. yeah

I WOULD CARE MORE ABOUT MS. MILLER IF I CONSIDERED HER A REAL JOURNALIST RATHER THAN WHAT SHE IS - A CERFIFIED BUSH WHORE

I actually do have concerns about the unnamed sources issue sources but I'm convinced those eight blank pages that convinced a judge to go the extra mile to get this information are very damning