Democracy Now! interviewed John R. (Rick) McArthur, publisher of Harper's magazine and Jim Naureckas, editor of Extra!, a bimonthly publication of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

Naureckas thinks that by protecting their sources, the NYT's Judith Miller and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper are protecting government wrongdoers.

An excerpt:

RICK MacARTHUR: Well, it's very disturbing. And it's tremendously ironic, given that this is the -- first of all, I don't -- I assume that this prosecution is not a -- is not a neutral prosecution. I'm assuming it's a political prosecution. Now, maybe I'm wrong, but the irony in there -- that's in this prosecution is that Judith Miller, and I guess Matthew Cooper, but particularly Judith Miller, is a friend of the Bush administration. There is not a journalist -- if there's one journalist who contributed the most to getting us into the war or getting us into the invasion of Iraq, and helped make -- helped Bush make his case, it’s Judith Miller. So, you can’t say that they're taking care of their friends.

So, on the other hand, as a matter of principle, I mean, I have been denouncing Judith Miller for two years, from way before the W.M.D. fraud was revealed. And we file at Harper's magazine an amicus brief on her behalf, as a matter principle, because we do believe that reporters, and I, as a reporter, feel sometimes it's essential to be able to protect the confidentiality of a source, but this is crazy, because she didn't publish anything. It's Novak who published – who revealed the name of the – of Valerie Plame.

So, the best I can -- I can’t pretend to understand the inside politics of it, but it does seem to be a case where they're taking care of their better friend, who is Robert Novak. And Novak, we can assume, cooperated with the prosecution, told the prosecutors who the other reporters were who the leaker attempted to leak to, because obviously this was a reprisal for Joe Wilson's column in the Times, his op-ed piece. And they wanted to punish him, and they wanted to punish his wife, and -- or punish him by making it impossible for her to -- his wife to work anymore as a covert operative. But in the end, it's just -- it's absolutely weird that Judith Miller would actually have to do time -- I'm not sure whether there's going to be actual jail time -- when she is the best friend the Bush administration ever had.

AMY GOODMAN: Jim Naureckas of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. You take a different view on this.

JIM NAURECKAS: Yeah, I think Judith Miller's role in this is kind of a – in a way, kind of a red herring. You know, she's famous for her bad reporting on the weapons of mass destruction issue in Iraq and also some bad U.N. reporting, as well. But this really is not about Judith Miller. She didn't report anything, nor did – and Cooper didn't report until after Plame had been named, but this is not about their reporting. This is about their being witnesses to a crime, which is the government crime releasing information that the government did not have a legal right to release in order to punish a dissident by striking at his family.

AMY GOODMAN: And the crime was releasing information -- the name of a C.I.A. operative.

JIM NAURECKAS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Undercover.

JIM NAURECKAS: Which -- and then in this case, the disclosure is being used to punish dissent by going after the dissident's family. It's a very serious thing. We do at FAIR believe that anonymous sources can be very important in revealing government wrongdoing, but in this case, the anonymous source is a government wrongdoer. This is someone who is presumably acting on behalf of the administration to silence a administration critic. And to say that the reporters who have witnessed this crime have an absolute right not to testify about it is to say that the government has an absolute right to reveal any confidential information that the government has about individuals in order to punish those individuals for speaking out against the government. And that's just a – that’s a sweeping power that I think it would be very dangerous to give the government.

AMY GOODMAN: Rick MacArthur.

RICK MacARTHUR: Well, I understand Jim's point and, of course, we live in a country where we used to pride ourselves, at least, in the notion that nobody was above the law. So, the -- part of me is sympathetic to what he's saying, I mean, because, of course, you don't want reporters to consider themselves, broadly speaking, above the law. But I'm also very mindful of precedence: the Morrison case during the Reagan administration, and so on, where the government sees an opportunity to chill leakers, and that the overall ambition of the Bush administration and of the Justice Department is to scare the hell out of the bureaucracy. It's to scare the hell out of the civil service so that they don't leak and so that reporters – and to discourage reporters from taking leaks or from taking information from confidential sources, because any time you get into one of these confidential source cases, you have to assume that the intimidation is not just aimed at the reporters, it's aimed the at civil service. It's aimed at the bureaucrats who might consider leaking in the future. And if Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper actually do time for this, it sends a message to the whole bureaucracy, to the whole federal civil service, similar to the leak of the Valerie Plame -- Valerie Plame's identity, saying don't leak, and if you do leak, the reporters who you leak to may be punished, and next time, maybe the reporters won't be so principled, and they'll name you. So, I'm very, very concerned as a journalist. And I understand this is a slippery slope. It's tricky. But overall, I think Judith Miller, who is a disgrace as a reporter, a real disgrace, and Matthew Cooper, who I don't know anything about, as a matter of principle they need to be defended.