Saturday, May 06, 2006
Eat at Joe's
Stop the "War on the press." These people just can't get enough of themselves.
But this is bigger and more ominous. The attempt by a U.S. attorney in Los Angeles to force Williams and Fainaru-Wada to reveal how they received federal grand-jury documents in the BALCO case is merely the latest in what appears to be a concerted effort to intimidate and reshape the news media away from its traditional role as a government watchdog.
The Chron could've picked some bigger hills to stand on. Government watchdog? More like government voyeur. The government was in the middle of doing its job. Nothing was being hidden. It would've come out when the trials and guilty pleas rolled around. No government malfeasance was present, to be unmasked. In this situation, apparently, we needed the brave government watchdogs to witness a crime being committed and then go absolutely silent when asked about it. Oh, and this crime, completely by coincidence, netted these witnesses book deals (money) and reporting awards. Wow. Amazing. Way to stand up for the public.
Indeed, this case is not just about the federal government vs. The Chronicle. It's about whether government has a right to determine what the public can know about its inner workings.
Yeah. Look, dudes, why don't you save this rhetoric for a situation when your reporters are actually reporting on the inner workings of the government, as opposed to, say, a bunch of MLB players who took steroids? It feels pretty out-of-place here.
Now, a newspaper with real balls might draw a connection to this story, where a witness was murdered, likely because of his grand jury testimony against gang dudes. It might remind folks that grand jury secrecy isn't a technicality that exists for no reason. The burden should really be on the Chron to explain why the rights of witnesses in a grand jury, testifying under an assumption of secrecy, should be ignored whenever a reporter wants a story/book deal.
Reporters bitch about how "hey, if we have to report our sources, no one will come to us." Does it just not occur to them that folks might think "hey, if grand jury testimony isn't secret after all, I'm not going to say anything in front of it"? If this happens, reporters still won't get their stories, but now the government isn't going to be able to get indictments, either. And reporters love reporting on indictments.
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