The Press as Antagonists

Nick Lemann is one of the few somewhat objective staff writers at The New Yorker (he's also professor of journalism at NYU), and he has written a piece this week on the confusing Valerie Plame case that doesn't do much to clear up the confusion.

But there is one illuminating passage, where he talks about the way the press, or news media, has been transformed since Watergate and Richard Nixon:

In the late nineteen-seventies, around the time that the current generation of foreign-policy conservatives was coalescing in Washington, a ne idea about the press corps was forming, too. Vietnam and Watergate had discredited the old ideal of the Washington-establishment reporter, wh dined with top officials, and who was proud to be a part of the governmental process. Instead, reporters would be muckraking outsiders, who pu before the public the truth about their government, which they would have got from courageous, obscure sources. In this new scenario, peopl who anonymously gave information to reporters were good guys; high Administration officials, who were likely to be bad guys, were merel press-conference purveyors of the party line. It was on this theory that many state legislatures in the nineteen-seventies passed laws protecting th reporter-source relationship—laws that gave journalists an officially enhanced legal and professional status, premised on their implicit oppositio to officialdom

But Congress never passed such a law; and in 1972, in a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court had ruled that the First Amendment does not protect a reporter from having to testify before a grand jury. During the past few years, prosecutors and judges have shown themselves to be increasingly impatient with the idea that journalists have special privileges. Meanwhile, in Washington, the old journalistic way of doing business had not, it turned out, actually vanished from the scene along with the Alsop brothers and Walter Lippmann. Government officials still attempt to use the press to gain advantage, and they still use anonymous leaks as well as scripted scenes. Even the press-resistant Bush White House leaks. Editors still want their reporters to get access to top officials, in the hope of finding information that their competition doesn’t have. Especially in the small world of foreign policy and national security, the reporters and columnists for the leading news organizations tend to be assigned to their beats semipermanently, and to have close, confidential relationships with officials. This is no less the case today than it was in the Clinton Administration; it’s just that a different set of journalists (Charles Krauthammer, for example) have the better access. In the end, the chummy imperatives of Washington trumped the press’s independent self-conception.