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For Judith Miller, a little advocacy is in order

By LUCY MORGAN
Published July 23, 2005

It has been almost 32 years since a judge in Pasco County decided I should spend eight months in jail or cough up the names of a couple of sources. It seems like yesterday.

It happened on Nov. 1, 1973. Pasco-Pinellas State Attorney James T. Russell subpoenaed me about 11 a.m., demanding that I appear in Dade City at 4 p.m. to name the sources of a story published the same morning.

Who says justice can't move swiftly?

By 5 p.m. I was posting bail and wondering whether readers of the St. Petersburg Times would understand why I was willing to go to jail to protect a source. What would I tell our children? Jail was for people who had done something wrong. How could they possibly understand?

I need not have worried. Early the next morning my phone started ringing off the hook, and retirees began dropping by the office with home-baked cakes and loaves of bread - all with hacksaws and files baked inside.

The children were excited. "Mom, are you really going to jail?" was the question as I picked up my sons from a Police Athletic League football practice. The news was ahead of me.

From all around the world I received letters and calls from citizens who could not understand why any judge and prosecutor would put the mother of three children in jail for honoring a pledge of confidentiality. Russell got hate mail.

We appealed, spending lots of Times dollars and three years of our lives working to overturn the jail sentence. There were many sleepless nights. I expected to go to jail. In 1973, the Florida Supreme Court was not our friend. Little did I know it would be reconstituted by the time my case got there in 1976. The ruling on July 31 overturned the sentence, establishing a limited privilege for reporters in Florida.

I bought a lot of good books, including the complete works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, thinking I needed something to do. Editor Gene Patterson told me I should expect to write a daily column from the Pasco County jail and that the Times would provide help for my children left at home.

Sheriff Basil Gaines saw me arriving at the courthouse the day after I was sentenced, making my daily rounds.

"It ain't much, but the best I have is yours," Gaines joked.

He was on the top of the list of people who didn't want me to spend a day in his jail. No sheriff looks forward to having a nosy reporter with hours of time to fill listening to other inmates and recording the daily doings at his jail.

A daily account of life inside would remind people that our government was stifling leaks by jailing reporters.

Judith Miller, a reporter for the New York Times, went to jail two weeks ago for refusing to testify before a grand jury and prosecutor who wanted her to identify sources. Oddly enough, there was no story that relied on those sources. Prosecutors just want to know whom she was talking to.

The New York Times is taking a low-key view of things instead of asking Miller to file daily reports of life inside. They don't want to tick off the judge.

"I don't want to cross over the line into using the newspaper as a promotional vehicle for her case," New York Times editor Bill Keller explained this week to Editor & Publisher magazine.

A Miller story every day would drum up sympathy and become advocacy instead of journalism, he said.

Jiminy Cricket!

Sometimes newspapers need to engage in advocacy. Like when the government jails reporters because they won't disclose the names of people they talk to in confidence.

There are many elements to this story, and Karl Rove, the president's brain, may well be in the middle of them. But the scariest part is the threat this poses to all of journalism and government.

If some prosecutor can summon us to court and demand to know who we are talking to, the only people who will talk to us will be those who want us to do their bidding. We would be telling our readers only what government wants them to know.

I'd say a little advocacy is in order. At the very least.

[Last modified July 23, 2005, 00:52:10]