Bush versus the press

Peter Huck

The ordeal facing two U.S. reporters who refuse to name their sources shows the U.S. President's hostility to the media.

EVEN BY the standards of the assault on the U.S. media by the Bush administration, the plight of two reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle is surreal. On February 12, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada will appear before the three judges of the 9th U.S. circuit court of appeal in San Francisco. They will contest an 18-month prison sentence, imposed in September when they were cited for contempt after refusing to name their sources.

But unlike the Valerie Plame case, in which The New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed for contempt after she refused to reveal a confidential source who ousted the undercover CIA agent, Mr. Williams and Mr. Fainaru-Wada's 450 stories, and a subsequent book, touched on no national security issues. Instead, they covered the 2003 Balco steroid scandal, in which federal authorities busted the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative that provided drugs to professional athletes, including baseball stars. Baseball fan President Bush congratulated the pair in person. "He told us our stories had done a service," says Mr. Williams. Three years later the case is coming down to the wire after what Eve Burton, counsel for San Francisco Chronicle owner Hearst Corp., calls "an epic battle."

She stands by the paper's reporting and is optimistic her side will prevail.

"This President is probably the most hostile in modern times when it comes to press freedoms," says Jonathan Turley, professor of constitutional law at George Washington University. "This President believes his privileges are absolute and unassailable. But when it comes to any other privilege the administration is uniformly hostile." Confrontations with journalists are "relished."

This week, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, vice-president Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff, will go on trial in Washington, charged with perjury and obstruction in the Plame case.A military court has subpoenaed two freelancers and a Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporter for the February trial of a conscientious objector who refused to deploy to Iraq and spoke at a Veterans For Peace rally. Then there is Josh Wolf, a freelance journalist jailed in California last August after he refused to turn over video of an anti-G8 demonstration to a federal grand jury.

If journalists refuse to reveal sources in the Libby trial, the issue may re-ignite on national TV. Reporters risk jail. But the DoJ risks looking like a rogue agency on an anti-media jihad. National security is one thing. But jailing reporters for helping to expose links between a doping ring and America's national game is quite another.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007