It’s been several weeks now, but the public still does not yet know which two White House officials were responsible for illegally leaking the name of an undercover CIA agent to the press.
The Justice Department is still investigating the matter (apparently, under John Ashcroft’s very close supervision), but no word has surfaced about preliminary findings.
The journalists who were approached by the White House with the information, meanwhile, have also not divulged the identities of the leakers. The reporters know that their reputations would be ruined if they identified their anonymous sources — no one would ever want to share information with him or her again.
With this in mind, I really like the suggestion from Alton Frye, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, who came up with a clever way to help reporters get the word out.
In a column in today’s New York Times, Frye recommends the leakees become the leakers. He calls it “counterleaking.”
“[J]ournalists are dissuaded from naming sources of all kinds by both ethical considerations and pragmatic concerns over future access,” Frye explained. “This creates a situation in which a devious leaker is shielded by the journalist’s ethical restraint — and derives de facto constitutional shelter under the reporter’s First Amendment privilege…. To protect against such manipulative behavior — and to discipline those who practice it — reporters could themselves assume the status of confidential sources and share those names with other journalists.”
Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t work. If one source secretly gives one reporter a piece of information, the reporter can’t turn around and give the identity of the source to someone else. The source would know who was responsible and the reporter would be in trouble.
But one of the interesting things about the Plame Game scandal is that so many reporters were involved. Bob Novak eventually ran a column with the identity of the CIA operative, but as the Washington Post reported late last month, the White House officials involved with the leak contacted “at least six” other DC journalists with the information.
In other words, one of these reporters could quietly tell his or her colleagues the identity of the White House leakers, but the White House wouldn’t know which reporter was responsible.
As Frye put it, “Any of those individuals has the power to resolve this episode and still maintain ‘plausible deniability.’ They could do so by confiding who their source was to another reporter who did not receive such a call.”
In fact, Frye believes this “counterleak” — reporter to reporter — would do everyone a huge favor.
“This country should not have to endure a protracted inquiry into the matter,” Frye said. “Nor should it have to wrestle with the trade-offs between First Amendment rights and national security considerations. Not only would counterleaking resolve the present commotion, it would also deter future leakers from trying to turn reporters into tools of political combat. President Bush urges those in the know to come forward. It should not be difficult to find a scrupulous journalist to carry the message.”
Good idea. I hope it works.