Journalist Schmournalist

Just a quickie to point out this story about blogger journalists who refused to out their anonymous sources to a California court after publishing information about upcoming Apple products and gettin' their pants sued off as a result. The judge ruled that people who out company secrets are not protected by California's shield law, which protects journalists from outing their sources. I wonder if by that rationale the Pentagon Papers would have been deemed "company secrets" ... anyway, my point: Judith Miller was heralded as a hero (before it came out, of course, that the whole thing was orchestrated) but these bloggers ain't exactly New York Times journalists, so no one was too interested in THEIR staunch refusals to out their sources.

When that "Free Judith Miller" online petition circled around last summer long before we had gotten Chapter Two (or was it Three?) of the ongoing degradation of the Kingdom and the Power I just passed it on without signing. I figured a) it's great to have professional ethics, but there is no guarantee that the law is going to mirror those professional ethics, so you'd better be ready to suck up the legal consequences if you choose to stand by them and b) no one was ever likely to forward a petition in support of bloggers and National Enquirer journos going to jail for refusing to out their sources and as such, the whole exercise just felt too hyprocritical.

A brilliant trail of logic which finally led me to c) the whole pseudo-heroic thing made me want to barf.