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Jail for reporters...maybe

As you've heard, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wade, the reporters who wrote "Game of Shadows", could be heading to prison. This Associated Press story on SI.com has the details in the clearest form I've seen them.

In fact, why don't I just quote the first two paragraphs:

A federal judge ordered two San Francisco Chronicle reporters jailed Thursday, pending an appeal, for refusing to testify about who leaked them secret grand jury testimony from Barry Bonds and other elite athletes.

Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada published a series of articles and a book based partly on the leaked transcripts of the testimony of Bonds, Jason Giambi and others before a grand jury investigating the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, a Burlingame-based nutritional supplement company exposed as a steroid ring two years ago.
Got that? They're not going to jail for telling the truth, and they're not going to jail for writing about the leaked testimony. (I'm not sure how much, if any, trouble they'd be in if they'd printed it but were cooperating now. Help me out, Cap.) If the reporters do go to jail, it's because they received the leaked testimony and refused to testify as to how they got it.

I admit that I am inclined to give reporters the benefit of almost every doubt. This was, if not an incredibly important story, certainly one that engaged the public interest. (While it's fashionable for sports fans to claim they don't care what athletes do or use, I think they say that only because it's easier than thinking.) And I guess I'm glad we found out what was said behind closed doors. That said, I can't shake the feeling that maybe grand jury testimony is secret for a reason.

A free press is critical to a free society, no doubt about it. But if the president's not above the law, I certainly don't think reporters should be. Besides, what is a reporter anyway? I've never broken news on this site, but many bloggers have-does that make them reporters? And can't anyone set up a blog in a few minutes? You see where I'm going with that, right? I think we can all tell a serious reporter from someone who's desperately seeking legitimacy, but I don't know how to make a legal standard for that even if we decided we did want to grant reporters additional legal protection.

I have a ton of respect for Williams and Fainaru-Wade and their professional ethics. I know I certainly wouldn't want to give up a year and a half of my life to keep a source secret.

What do you think? Should they go to jail for this? Should they be willing to?

Comments

Mike said…
Thanks for commenting (finally). But our opinions are close enough that I don't know what else to say.
10:18 PM
Mike said…
I can't decide if "coterminous" is cool or awful, but the way I'm leaning it might be my new favorite word.

I agree, there's no other way to get them to talk. Weekend imprisonment? I do remember reading that, and that has to be a joke, right? I mean, it would suck, don't get me wrong, but wow. "I won't name the source, but I'll stay home on a lot of Saturdays." Yeah, that's just as good, frankly. And it's nice to point out the contempt of court thing, because clearly they the prosecutors are just trying to get the information, not necessarily punish the reporters for, I don't know, embarrassing the government or something.
1:26 PM
Mike said…
I'm pretty idealistic about this stuff, so I'd say they shouldn't give up their source. Obviously they got the information on the promise of confidentiality, and it'd be pretty selfish and I think wrong to sell their source out at this point. I'm sure they knew what they were getting into and they took the risk anyway.

Having said that, whether or not Barry Bonds (and other athletes) took steroids isn't important enough that I would want to go to jail over the public's "right to know" about it. I wonder whether I would have printed any of this to begin with. Maybe that's a coward's way out, though.
3:28 PM
Mike said…
I don't like the "public's right to know" just because I think it's a stupid phrase. As for Bonds, everyone I talked to had already made up their minds about him before this came out.

Certainly news media outlets exist to make money, though that's not necessarily the goal of every individual reporter (it's a dumb career choice if you want to get rich, though I imagine these homeboys had a good idea of how this would help their careers). These guys are probably doing it for both reasons.
10:49 AM
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