Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Judith Miller, of The New York Times have been pressured to reveal their source for the identity of a CIA agent. Cooper cooperated; Miller went to jail. Refusing to reveal their sources was based upon the right principle, but it was an poor application of it.

The Economist explains the situation:

In his state-of-the-union speech in January 2003, George Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had tried to acquire uranium from Africa. On July 6th, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who had earlier gone to Niger for the CIA to investigate this, wrote an article in the New York Times disputing Mr Bush's assertion.

Mr Bush's people hit back. On July 14th Robert Novak, a veteran conservative columnist, published an article, sourced to two “senior administration officials”, outing Mr Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA “agency operative” and claiming that she had suggested to the CIA that it send her husband to Niger in the first place.

Where do Miller and Cooper come into this? Cooper created a follow-up story and Miller researched a story, but never published it. The fuss all this created led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald. But why the focus on those two rather than Novak? How did they even know about Miller, since she never published her story?

Mr Novak has never appeared to be in danger of going to jail; he has never even been publicly asked to testify. But it was Mr Novak who broke the story about Ms Plame. Mr Cooper's piece didn't add anything much to Mr Novak's story. Ms Miller didn't even publish a story on the subject. It is widely assumed that Mr Novak co-operated with the federal prosecutor. But he has said little about the investigation other than that it would be “madness” to infer that he was responsible for Ms Miller or Mr Cooper going to jail.

Novak's apparent immunity from questioning is very suspicious. The wider questions of journalistic ethics are probably more important, though. Just how far should a journalist go in order to protect a source — and should society allow such protection?

[C]onfidential sources are problematic when it comes to the public interest. Journalists have a private interest in cultivating confidential sources to maximise their access to privileged information. But was Mr Novak's original story serving his readers or his private source? Ms Miller's sources helped produce a series of scoops during the run-up to the Iraq war about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. But the New York Times's public editor later conceded that the paper's coverage of Iraq had often consisted of “breathless stories built on unsubstantiated revelations that, in many instances, are the anonymity-cloaked assertions of people with vested interests.”

If anyone is going to reveal evidence of government malfeasance, it will probably be anonymously or confidentially to a reporter and it will probably be illegal to do so. This means that investigative reporters will have to rely on confidential sources and illegal leaks in order to obtain evidence of wrongdoing, including criminal wrongdoing, by the government.

Sometimes those sources will be acting out of altruism; sometimes in order to get revenge for some real or perceived slight by superiors. Regardless, they probably won't do it unless they can count on being protected by the reporters — they are taking a big risk and reporters need to offer them something in exchange for that.

Thus, it's a good principle for reporters to be willing to protect the identities of government sources and for others to respect that. It's not, however, an absolute. It's an abstract principle whose validity is entirely dependent upon the larger principle of serving the public interest by revealing wrongdoing.

Did that occur in this case? Did Novak receive information from a confidential source that revealed wrongdoing or otherwise helped serve the public interest? No. In this case, the apparent purpose of the leak was to harm a critic of the administration. The reporters allowed themselves to be used as tools of government officials seeking to harm others (perhaps willingly, as some think was the case with Novak).

That's why I say that the principle is being applied improperly here. Telling the truth is a valid ethical principle, but it can be applied improperly — you shouldn't tell Nazis where Jews are hiding, for example, because of some abstract commitment to the truth. Once reporters realized that they were being used and that their commitment to confidentiality was being abused, they should have talked.

Investigative reporters should have a dual statement of policy: anyone who confidentially reveals genuine information about government wrongdoing will be protected to the hilt, even if it means going to jail (and even if the source's motives are less than perfect); anyone who abuses this in order to harm someone and thus is not serving the larger public interest will be burned via public outing. If Cooper, Miller, and Novak had any decency and any principles worth standing up for, that's what they would have done.

Read More:

• Guide to Ethics and Morality
• News About Ethics