The Novak Exception

A WSJ house editorial at OpinionJournal, today, exposes another facet of mainstream media's liberal hypocrisy:

.... Instead of lauding Mr. Novak for protecting his sources, many of his colleagues in the Fourth Estate seem eager to throw him over the side. Call it "the Novak exception." By that we mean the rule that comes into play when a conservative journalist is involved. No critic could sum this up better than Geneva Overholser did in her New York Times op-ed earlier this month calling for Mr. Novak to betray his sources.

"Never burn a source," writes Ms. Overholser. "It's a cardinal rule of journalism: do not disclose the identity of someone who gives you information in confidence. As a staunch believer in this rule for decades, I have surprised myself lately by concluding that journalists' proud absolutism on this issue — particularly in a case involving the syndicated columnist Robert Novak — is neither as wise nor as ethical as it has seemed."

Now, some of us aren't as surprised by Ms. Overholser as she professes herself to be. A former "ombudsman" at the Washington Post, she is the same media ethicist who recently resigned from the board of the National Press Foundation because it had bestowed an award on Fox News anchor Brit Hume.

But most of the rest of the media establishment has been either silent or has joined Ms. Overholser's new enthusiasm for Big Brother. Typical was the comment in a recent issue of Editor & Publisher — the establishment's trade paper — by Mike Leonard, president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Mr. Leonard loftily declared that "if I were party to a crime I'd fess up and not hide behind journalistic privilege." This is the same Mr. Leonard who uses his own column in the Bloomington Herald-Times to attack the Patriot Act for its "heavy-handed assaults on free speech."

The double media standard here is breathtaking, not to mention depressing for those who believe in a free press. The same Beltway media who thrive on leaks don't seem to mind now that a special prosecutor has been unleashed on one of their fellows and his sources. The media deny that there is a "liberal bias," but it is hard to conclude anything else when they are willing to ignore their own free-press principles in order to take sides in what is at root a political battle about the Iraq war....

See Demomediagate.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 02/20/04 05:37:14 PM
Categorized as Media.