Dynamic Duo
Poynter Online – Journalists Respond to NYT‘s Story of Judith Miller’s Role in Plame Investigation — Insiders think this is bigger than the Jayson Blair fiasco…especially after it was discovered that Miller had a secret security clearance granted by the Bush Administration.
Retired CBS News correspondent Bill Lynch says the scandal is Judith Miller’s revelation that she was granted a Defense Department security clearance while embedded with the WMD search team in Iraq. “This is as close as one can get to government licensing of journalists and the New York Times — if it knew — should never have allowed her to become so compromised,” he writes. “In my opinion, Miller violated her duty to report the truth by accepting a binding obligation to withhold key facts the government deems secret, even when that information might contradict the reportable ‘facts.'”
I see the signing of NDA’s by big media journalists as being exactly the same sort of violation. And those large circulation news magazines do all sorts of secret deals with big companies to put their products on the cover while witholding information from the public until the big company says it is OK. It’s a common practice. How is this that different?
The real irony here is that the NY Times is the one publication that honks its horn over ethics more than any other.
This really deserves investigation but won’t be since we’ve voted to have a government without checks and balances.
You can bet your last dollar that it isn’t isolated to the New York Times.
It’s a good bet that the Whitehorse has scores of moles in newspapers, cable TV channels, blogs, etc. Probably paid with MY tax dollars.
This is outrageous and totally offensive to true lovers of freedom and democracy.
Journalist do trade a lot for NDA’s, but you could also stop it. As a group if you refused to give months of free press to these companies, what else could they do? They thrive on the teases without details. I can’t count the times that the tech press has hyped up what turns out to be junk or vapor. Having employees or contractors sign NDA’s is entirely different.