Taking the fifth: when journalists threaten our right to remain silent.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Columns - Column

DECEMBER 2004 MAY go down in history as the month it suddenly became fashionable to threaten and even punish American reporters with jail. You could make a plausible case that over just three days, December 8-10, there was more serious judge-on-journalist action than in the three decades prior to George W. Bush's first oath of office:

December 8. Time's Matthew Cooper and The New Fork Times' Judith Miller appeared in federal court to appeal an October contempt-of-court ruling. The judgment threatens both with 18-month prison sentences for not complying with a special prosecutor's order to cough up the sources who told them that Valerie Plame, wife of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson IV, was a CIA agent. Miller hadn't even written an article about Plame.

December 9. Jim Taricani of NBC affiliate WJAR-TV in Providence, Rhode Island, was sentenced to six months of house arrest for refusing to tell a federal judge where he got an FBI surveillance videotape of a local mayoral aide accepting a $1,000 bribe. Taricani's source, an attorney who represented a city tax official, had outed himself the week before, but the judge said he wanted to send a message that "reporters do not have complete authority to decide when sources can be kept secret."

December 10. The Washington Post, citing "officials," revealed details about a previously secret and congressionally unpopular $9.5 billion spy satellite program, prompting the National Reconnaissance Office (which oversees defense satellites) to call for a Justice Department investigation into the leak.

Compare that 1970-2000, when--according to the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, which has surveyed the issue extensively--no American journalist spent "any significant amount of time behind bars" for refusing to divulge a confidential source.

December's splashiest leak came from the world of baseball, where the secret grand jury testimony of seven-time National League Most Valuable Player Barry Bonds was published at length in the San Francisco Chronicle, triggering an anti-steroids outcry from the Golden Gate Bridge to the White House. In response to the Chron's chronic leakage, U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan requested a formal Justice Department investigation to hunt down the illegally loose lips. Three Chronicle reporters already have received subpoenas, and editor Phil Bronstein has vowed to defy any judicial source-disclosure order.

"The First Amendment ... allows us to publish...