UNITED STATE
New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, was released September 29 after spending more than 12 weeks in jail for refusing to reveal a confidential source. Her release came about after her lawyers secured a voluntary and personal waiver from a Bush administration source, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, who released her from a pledge of confidentiality.
Miller testified the next day before a grand jury investigating who leaked the identity of an undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. Miller's lawyers say she changed her mind about testifying after she was assured that a waiver signed by Libby and given to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was not coerced.
Her testimony was limited to conversations she had with Libby in July 2003. Her release came 10 days after Miller spoke by phone from jail with Libby. During that conversation, Libby reaffirmed that he had released Miller from a promise of confidentiality more than a year earlier, according to Libby's lawyer, Joseph A. Tate of Philadelphia. Libby had signed a blanket waiver, but Miller worried that senior Bush administration officials might have coerced it. "She wanted to hear it directly from Mr. Libby," Tate said, "and he assured her that it was voluntary."
Miller's case has been the subject of enormous debate in media circles in the United States. While some have held her up as a champion of press freedom, others have sharply questioned the New York Times' handling of her case. For example, it remains unclear why Libby's waiver was not accepted by Miller sooner, especially given the mutual respect expressed between the two involved.
Her arrest has also led to calls to strengthen "shield" laws protecting journalists from been legally obliged to reveal their sources. In some cases, news executives are issuing guidelines to educate and retrain their staffs about taking precautions to protect their notes and other source materials from being sought as evidence in legal cases.
An IAPA delegation visited Miller while she was in jail, headed by IAPA president Alejandro Miró Quesada. After the visit Aug 10, the IAPA issued a statement of support for Miller, praising her courage and defending journalists' right not to reveal the identity of their sources.
More than two dozen reporters in the US have been subpoenaed or questioned in the last 18 months about their confidential sources.
Rhode Island TV reporter, Jim Taricani (WJAR-TV)was released from house arrest April 9 after serving four months of a six months sentence. The sentence was imposed by a judge in December 2004 after Taricani refused to reveal who gave him a tape used as evidence in the corruption trial of a city official. While under house arrest Taricani was barred from accessing the internet, working, or speaking with the media.
In October the Supreme Court turned down an appeal from The Boston Globe stemming from the paper's refusal to reveal a confidential source. The Globe was appealing a $2 million defamation judgment against it and reporter Richard Knox.
The Globe had been sued by a doctor, Lois Ayash, who argued the paper wrongly blamed her in a front page story for the death of one of its own staff. Globe health columnist, Betsy Lehman, died in 1994 from an overdose of experimental cancer drugs.
The newspaper reported Ayash was the leader of a team of doctors caring for Lehman, and that she countersigned a medical order that resulted in Lehman's death. The Globe later published a correction saying Ayash had not countersigned the order, but it stood by the allegation that she was the head of the treatment team. Ayash sued and demanded that the paper reveal a confidential source. The newspaper refused to identify its source, and lost the case by default.
A jury decided the paper should pay $1.68 million in damages with another $420,000 to be paid by the reporter, Richard Knox.
The Globe was supported in its appeal to the Supreme Court by the Associated Press and more than a dozen media companies and journalist associations. The groups's attorney, Laura Handman, told justices that the ruling against the Globe "is doubly unconstitutional because it allows a public-figure plaintiff to recover damages for libel without proving any publication was false or that the press acted with actual malice."
A federal judge in New York City ordered the release of the controversial photos depicting detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, ruling that the public's right to see the photos trumps the government's desire to shroud the information.
The government had argued that releasing the images might incite violence against U.S. troops or perpetuate further terrorism. Citing the Freedom of Information Act, U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein called the photos the "best evidence" of what occurred at the U.S.-run prison near Baghdad.
In September a study by the Committee to Protect Journalists argued that the US military "consistently fails" to probe journalists killings in Iraq. The CPJ also concluded that the Pentagon had failed to implement its own recommendations to improve media safety.
Thirteen journalists have been killed since the Iraq war began in March 2003, according to the CPJ. At least 40 other journalists have been killed covering the conflict, as well as 21 media support staff.
IAPA has previously reported on several of these incidents. The latest involves the shooting death of Reuters soundman, Waleed Khaled. Initial US military statement said that "appropriate" procedures had been followed.
U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) has introduced a bill that would allow live television coverage of U.S. Supreme Court arguments. The bill would deny access to broadcast media with cameras only if the majority in a particular case decided cameras would violate due process.
The Ontario Supreme Court ruled Sept 16 that a Canadian court has no jurisdiction over The Washington Post in a defamation case based mainly on the publication of two stories on the newspaper's Web site. At the time of the articles' publication in 1997, Ontario had only seven subscribers who received the Post daily, the plaintiff was not an Ontario resident, and the only person who accessed the articles on the Post's electronic archives was the plaintiff's lawyer. It's really a great decision," said Kurt Wimmer of Covington & Burling, co-counsel who also represented an American media coalition in the case (which included the IAPA). "It recognizes the reality of Internet publishing and that it's not fair to force publishers to submit to jurisdiction anywhere in the world just because the story was downloaded."
U.S. and international media outlets complain of attacks on staff and the confiscation of film of shoot-outs between police and looters in the first days after the Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf region. They also cite an attempt to restrict coverage by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The agency publicly asked news organizations not to photograph bodies being recovered in Louisiana and Mississippi.
According to the reports presented by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), police in New Orleans ripped a camera from the neck of Lucas Oleniuk of the Toronto Star who had photographed clashes between police and looters. They removed memory cards, robbing Oleniuk of more than 350 images, which included shots of "officers delivering a fierce beating to two suspects, an assault so fearsome one of the suspects defecated," the Toronto Star reported.
The same day Gordon Russell of the New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote that he and a New York Times photographer, whom he did not name, were forced to flee the scene of a shoot-out between police and residents near the Convention Center where hurricane victims were awaiting evacuation after officers slammed the journalists against a wall and threw their gear to the ground.
Brian Williams, anchor for U.S. network NBC, said he and his crew were ordered to stop trying to film a National Guard unit securing a store in downtown New Orleans on September 7
An anti-paparazzi bill in Californias Assembly that would heavily punish the pursuit of celebrities by overly-aggressive photographers has won Senate Judiciary Committee endorsement. The proposal was added to an unrelated bill concerning contracts for minors in artistic employment that was gutted and replaced with a bill adding triple damages for assault to a section of California Civil Code.
The Chairman of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, which has a $400 million budget for public broadcasters partially funded by the federal government, secretly hired a consultant to monitor news and talk programs on public radio. The report found that "liberal" and anti-administration views were widespread. But critics say the report was itself inappropriate, politically biased, and riddled with errors.
