In the wake of the News Corp scandal and the resignation of their own paper's publisher/CEO, the editors of the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal came out swinging today (7/18/11) against critics who would question the Journal's own standards and even "perhaps injure press freedom in general."

Today's editorial first goes for deflection: Scotland Yard's failure to stop the hacking is "more troubling than the hacking itself," and "it is also worth noting the irony of so much moral outrage devoted to a single media company, when British tabloids have been known for decades for buying scoops and digging up dirt on the famous." (As if bribing police officers and illegally hacking into phones are "buying scoops and digging up dirt.")

The paper also warns against U.S. investigations into News Corp wrongdoing, reminding readers of the Valerie Plame Wilson case, in which the New York Times' Judy Miller did jail time for refusing to reveal which Bush administration official leaked the identity of the undercover CIA officer to right-wing columnist Bob Novak--an episode the Journal recalled as a Times-led "posse to hang Novak and his sources." Asked the editors, "Do our media brethren really want to invite Congress and prosecutors to regulate how journalists gather the news?"

In the Plame Wilson case, remarkably few in the media actually supported the government investigation, instead claiming source confidentiality ought to be absolute--no matter that the "whistleblowing" being protected was actually political retribution against a whistleblower. (See Extra!, 9-10/05.) Journalism that serves the public interest is crucial for a democracy and should be protected from state interference. But journalism that gives government officials cover to punish whistleblowers, or that hacks into people's phones in order to sell more copies of a newspaper, hardly serves the public interest. And the Journal made clear which master its version of journalism serves:

Our readers can decide if we are a better publication than we were four years ago, but there is no denying that News Corp. has invested in the product. The news hole is larger. Our foreign coverage in particular is more robust, our weekend edition more substantial, and our expansion into digital delivery ahead of the pack. The measure that really matters is the market's, and on that score Mr. Hinton was at the helm when we again became America's largest daily.

The Obama Justice Department--or at least one of its top prosecutors--is cracking down on investigative reporting without regard for the First Amendment.

The first disturbing development was the indictment of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, whose leaks to the Baltimore Sun helped expose how the NSA's warrantless spying program deliberately failed to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens.

Now the same prosecutor who indicted Drake--William Welch, who stepped down from a prior post as head of the Justice Department's public integrity unit after botching the prosecution of Sen. Ted Stevens (R.-Alaska)--has opened a new front against freedom of the press. Welch subpoenaed New York Times reporter James Risen to reveal his sources for the account in his book of a CIA operation that may have given Iran important information about how to create a nuclear bomb in the course of trying to infiltrate the Iranian nuclear program. The New York Times reports today (4/29/10):

The Obama administration is seeking to compel a writer to testify about his confidential sources for a 2006 book about the Central Intelligence Agency, a rare step that was authorized by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

The author, James Risen, who is a reporter for the New York Times, received a subpoena on Monday requiring him to provide documents and to testify May 4 before a grand jury in Alexandria, Va., about his sources for a chapter of his book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. The chapter largely focuses on problems with a covert CIA effort to disrupt alleged Iranian nuclear weapons research....

The Bush administration had sought Mr. Risen's cooperation in identifying his sources for the Iran chapter of his book, and it obtained an earlier subpoena against him in January 2008 under Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey. But Mr. Risen fought the subpoena, and never had to testify before it expired last summer. That left it up to Mr. Holder to decide whether to press forward with the matter by seeking a new subpoena.

If a judge does not agree to quash the subpoena and Mr. Risen still refuses to comply, he risks being held in contempt of court.

The Times report alludes to the case of Judith Miller, who was subpoenaed by independent counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to reveal which Bush administration official had revealed that the Valerie Plame, the wife of a prominent Bush critic, was an undercover CIA officer. FAIR encouraged Miller to cooperate with the prosecutor in that case, because no genuine public interest was served in protecting the identity of an official who had used classified information to punish a government critic.

In both the cases pursued by Welch, on the other hand, the targets are legitimate whistleblowers who revealed information that was of vital concern to the public. Risen has announced through his lawyer that he will fight the subpoena in court, and if he gets a judge who respects the First Amendment he should succeed. If Barack Obama and Eric Holder respect the First Amendment, meanwhile, they will rein in these disturbing efforts to squelch journalistic scrutiny of the state.

Arianna Huffington's latest column (Huffington Post, 7/13/09) presents a compelling portrayal of the power of new democratic media--versus the self-preserving corporate model of news gathering--in the Chinese government response to major riots last week: "It choked off the Internet and mobile phone service, blocked Twitter and Fanfou (its Chinese equivalent), deleted updates and videos from social networking sites, and scrubbed search engines of links to coverage of the unrest." But here's the rub: "At the same time, it invited foreign journalists to take a tour of the area":

That's right, it slammed the door in the face of new media--and offered traditional reporters a front-row seat.

China's leaders realized that it's one thing to try to spin the on-the-ground views of bussed-in reporters ("To help foreign media to do more objective, fair and friendly reports," in the words of the government's PR agency), but quite another to try to spin the accounts and uploaded images of tens of thousands of Twittering and cell-phone camera-wielding citizens.

The Chinese have clearly learned the lessons of Iran.

As Huffington reminds us, "the truth is, you don't have to 'be there' to bear witness. And you can be there and fail to bear witness."

Driving home the point that "the conclusions drawn by eyewitnesses are greatly influenced by the eyes doing the witnessing," Huffington then excerpts one of the most damaging journalistic examples of this in our time:

Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, [a scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade] pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried. This reporter also accompanied MET Alpha on the search for him and was permitted to examine a letter written in Arabic that he slipped to American soldiers offering them information about the program and seeking their protection.

So wrote an embedded Judith Miller, "bearing witness" to the "silver bullet" proof of Iraqi WMD in the New York Times in April 2003.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald (7/9/09, ad-viewing required) is extolling "The Significance of McClatchy's Act of Journalism" when reporting that recently released six-year Guantánamo prisoner Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil--one of many who supposedly "returned to or are suspected of returning to terrorism after their release"--"far from being in hiding, operates openly among officials of Afghanistan's U.S.-allied government."

Labeling Nancy Youssef's piece "a consummate example of excellent journalism," Greenwald also wants us to

note the central role the New York Times played--yet again--in spreading and given credence to pure government propaganda. And the method used to accomplish that is exactly what led them to help disseminate lies about the "Iraq threat" in the run-up to the war: Anonymous government sources leak something, they mindlessly print it without identifying who gave it to them, Dick Cheney cites the NYT article to bolster the lie, and then--even once the NYT is forced to admit they were used--they not only protect the identity of the anonymous sources who manipulated them, but they'll use the same exact method tomorrow--and the day after and the day after that--to report the "news."

What Judy Miller and Michael Gordon did in September, 2002 on the front page--that the NYT supposedly regrets so much--is exactly what Elisabeth Bumiller and her editors did here on the front page.

"As a result," Greenwald writes, "a blatant lie--that 1 in 7 released Guantánamo detainees 'returned to jihad'--became, as intended, embedded fact in our political debates." Read the FAIR Activism Update: "NY Times Ombud Agrees with Activists: Paper Failed to Question Pentagon Propaganda on Gitmo Prisoners" (6/8/09).

Finding the May 21 New York Times article on unconvicted (often even uncharged) former Guantánamo prisoners supposedly "rejoining" terrorist groups "especially troubling" in that "it turns the truth upside-down," Dan Kennedy (UTV, 6/9/09) explains how reporter Elisabeth "Bumiller's story played into the darkest fears promoted by Cheney and his fellow conservatives by making it appear that terrorists captured on the battlefield and sent to Guantánamo would resume their jihadist ways upon being released." In reality, "the far more disturbing truth, borne out by the Pentagon's own figures, is that we are creating terrorists at Guantánamo."

Yet it has to be said that Bumiller herself is something of a recidivist. In a March 2004 presidential debate among the Democratic contenders, Bumiller asked what may have been the dumbest question ever uttered in such a forum: "Really quick, is God on America's side?"

At the time, Bumiller's question seemed like a faint echo of the insanity that had fallen over much of the American media following the terrorist attacks of 9/11--insanity that was practically defined by Bumiller's former colleague Judith Miller, whose credulous reporting on Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons of mass destruction and terrorist ties helped set the stage for war and disaster.

Kennedy notes that "this time, at least, it didn't take years for the Times to come to terms with how it had been manipulated"--not that the Times' eventual "mea sorta culpa" for staggeringly deceptive and damaging WMD coverage exactly came to terms with much. See the FAIR Activism Update: "NY Times Ombud Agrees with Activists: Paper Failed to Question Pentagon Propaganda on Gitmo Prisoners" (6/8/09).

What happens after your credulous reporting helps sell the public argument on the case for the Iraq invasion, and your name becomes more or less synonymous with the broad media failures on the war?

You get hired by Fox News, according to today's Washington Post. Fox's John Moody's comments are worth a special note: "She has a very impressive résumé.... We've all had stories that didn't come out exactly as we had hoped.... She has explained herself and she has nothing to apologize for."

Fox News is expected to announce today the hiring of a new contributor, a veteran national security correspondent who has shared a Pulitzer Prize.

Her name is Judith Miller, and she is nothing if not controversial. Miller left the New York Times in 2005 after testifying in the trial of former White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby that he had leaked her information about a CIA operative. Miller's conduct in the case, which led to her serving 85 days in jail for initially refusing to testify, drew rebukes from the Times executive editor and some of her colleagues.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, Miller reported stories on the search for Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be untrue, some of which were cited in a Times editor's note acknowledging the flawed coverage. Miller, now with the conservative Manhattan Institute, wrote when she left the paper that she had "become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war."

Miller will be an on-air analyst and will write for Fox's website. "She has a very impressive résumé," says senior vice president John Moody. "We've all had stories that didn't come out exactly as we had hoped. It's certainly something she's going to be associated with for all time, and there's not much anyone can do about that, but we want to make use of the tremendous expertise she brings on a lot of other issues. . . . She has explained herself and she has nothing to apologize for."

See FAIR's media advisory: "Miller's Tale: Can the Reporter--or the New York Times--Be Trusted?" (10/21/05)