The trivialization of Deep Throat: Judith Miller and what she stands for

I'd like to momentarily come out of my self imposed no-post-every-day easy blogging summer schedule, and expand on a few remarks I made about Judith Miller over in the comments at Dharma Bums.

Years ago Woodward and Bernstein used an anonymous whistleblower to expose actual wrongdoing. It's important to remember that the Deep Throat whistleblower was _revealing_ a felony, not committing one.

That was certainly a long time ago. Things seem to have changed. (For one thing, Bush almost makes me nostalgic for Nixon.) Reporters nowadays cultivate anonymous insiders to get what amounts to secret downloads of official agitprop, and, sadly, it gives them cachet in their profession, perhaps because of the now remote and faded memory of Watergate. So it's been a long, strange road indeed, from Deep Throat to the Plame outing.

When reporters come to rely on insider contacts as their primary, or perhaps their only, real news source, like ants stroking aphids, at that point they become susceptible to being used--if these aphids are smarter than these ants, as appears to be the case--as unwitting (or maybe witless) conduits for the party line. That's how the whole movement towards war in Iraq was orchestrated, I believe. Judith Miller has a lot more to answer for than just her part in the Plame business.

Her sucking up to Chalabi and the neocons and reporting their carefully crafted lies as "news" remains a true benchmark in failed journalism. It's bad enough to have reporters embedded with the troops. It's worse to have them embedded with the Bush Administration.

But, the argument goes, we need to protect this system on principle, because, at some point, it may do the world some good again, like Woodward and Bernstein did, and like the reporters who brought the Downing Street Memo to the light of day.

I have trouble with this argument, not at the level of principle, but at the level of present-day Washington reality.

It is almost impossible to imagine an exposure of Watergate level wrongdoing, or an exposure of wrongdoing at all, by contemporary A-list reporters in the United Sates. The DSM reporting was not here in America, was it? No, it wasn't. Can you imagine a Downing Street Memo ever getting revealed and reported in today's Washington? I can't. The New York Times and the Washington Post led the charge (odd metaphor for suppression of the news, but, no matter) to bury this story once it was reported by a real press in another country.

Nor can I convince myself Judith Miller is standing on principle in going to jail. I could respect that, actually. I don't think she is even protecting her source. She is protecting her career, which is founded on sycophancy and schmoozing with important insiders. If she gave one of them up to the Law, she would never eat lunch in DC again. Her career would be ruined.

Or else she would have to go back to being a reporter.