By Patricia Lee Sharpe
That’s Judge David B. Sentelle, of the federal appeals court in Washington, who says that Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine must go to jail if they continue to refuse to divulge sources to a grand jury investigating the leak of a C.I.A. operative’s name. The prosecutor hopes the two will squeal to save themselves from serving time.
This decision is ominous enough for the prospect of a well-informed American public. But Judge Sentelle and his two colleagues on the bench went further. The proliferation of journalistic voices made possible by the Internet frightens them. “The judges debated,” according to the New York Times for February 16, “whether some sort of legal protection of reporters is even feasible in the Internet era.”
It was Judge Sentelle who asked:
Does the privilege also protect the proprietor of a Web log:
the stereotypical “blogger” sitting [in] his pajamas at his
personal computer posting on the World Wide Web his
best product to inform whoever happens to browse his way?
I seldom write in pajamas myself, but the judge’s scornful phrasing of the question can’t be ignored. Has Judge Sentelle never heard of Marcel Proust, who wrote A Remembrance of Things Past mostly in bed?
Maybe future judges don’t read literature. Maybe they also don’t read American history.
Has Judge Sentelle never heard of Peter Zenger, one of the heros of American journalism, the gutsy guy who ran an unofficial, which is to say “personal” little press in New York during the colonial period? He’s the one who was tried for seditious libel. He printed a truth the royal governor didn’t like. Since revolution was already in the air, Zenger was acquitted. The soon-to-be born United States of America was going to have an unmuzzled press, which some of us still cherish. If Zenger were living today, he’d be a blogger.
Benjamin Franklin also churned out newspapers that weren’t always popular with the powers-that-be. In fact, those were the great days of pamphleteering in England, too. Think of Thomas Paine. Think of Addison and Steele and so many others we still read and admire. They were lone wolves, often, and fiercely partisan, but they were often right.
They were the bloggers of their day.
Over the past decade or more, the major newspapers and TV networks on which we used to depend for news have cut back on editorial staff. As family-owned newspapers have gone public or been bought by chains and once-independent networks have been gobbled up by corporate behemoths, higher profits have been demanded and less has been invested in news gathering and presentation. There are fewer foreign bureaus, fewer reporters for investigative journalism, fewer feet (and keyboard fingers) pounding the national, state and city beats. The loss in depth and breadth of news is staggering. Ben Bagdikian and others have described it.
Suddenly, however, the information is flowing again. Computer science, modern telecommunications and a bumptious democratic spirit have converged to make possible a journalistic revolution that has traditionalists like Judge Sentelle reeling.
We bloggers don’t need millions to start a newspaper. We don’t even need advertisers, which means we are free of commercial pressures. All we need is a vision, a computer and a modest facility with words. And so we sit down and type out the hard questions that are going unasked. We ferret out the facts and add up the numbers, doing the research the commercial media hasn’t done. And then we deliver the information to the public; we get the much needed debate going. What’s so wrong, so scary about that?
Many bloggers are egoistic, superficial, opinionated, rude, crude and irresponsible, you say?
True. But too many political discussions on TV are nothing more than shout shows, and studies indicate that most local TV stations devoted more time to car crashes than to the election last fall. Reality television is not exactly edifying either. The magazine racks are full of fluff for both sexes, and need I mention the checkout counter tabloids? As for best-selling books, they tend to cluster in the self-help category. How, then, can blogging be held responsible for demeaning the quality of discourse in the United States?
Bloggers, so far from being a threat, may well be the heartening sign of a revival of substantive discourse and robust public debate that pundits have been calling for. They’ve simply been looking in all the wrong places. The "missing" public intellectuals in America are bloggers, and we are very much alive, airing the issues in this vast electronic cafe.
Meanwhile, we bloggers need to make common cause with our colleagues in the print media on free press issues. If Miller and Cooper go to jail for protecting sources that serve to inform a public this government prefers to keep in the dark, we’ll be next.
Finally, there’s the matter of Robert Novak. He’s the conservative columnist who actually printed Valerie’s Plume’s name, yet the government isn’t prosecuting him. Absent any explanation to the contrary, it’s hard not to conclude that only liberal or independent voices are to be stifled.
All the more reason to hail the advent of blogs and e-zines, the newest media for ensuring a well-informed public--until autocracy-minded judges like Mr. Sentelle figure out how to muffle electronic journalism, too.