Lewis Libby, Anthony Lewis and CultureGrrl

The I. Lewis Libby verdict and Anthony Lewis' Op-Ed piece about it in yesterday's NY Times brought to mind my own uneasy relationships with confidential sources.

Clearly, no national security is at risk in the course of my non-earthshattering artworld investigations: The only WMDs I write about are White Male Dominance in museum and gallery shows. (No, wait a minute. That's Jerry Saltz!) Still, I wish I had a dollar for every time I interviewed someone who declared, at the end of our wide-ranging discussion, "Of course, everything I just said was off the record."

My usual response is to politely deny confidentiality. If I have clearly identified myself as press, such ground rules have to be established at the beginning, not the end, of an interchange that I might not have been party to, had I known that I would not be able to directly use it.

A more difficult case is when a good source insists on confidentiality as a pre-condition for discussion. That's a tough judgment call. I usually insist upon staying on the record, going off only occasionally and for good reason. My job description is dissemination of information, not its suppression. That said, I would gladly go off the record for a "Deep Throat": someone who would be in jeopardy if it were known that he was the source of important information about higher-ups. It is crucially important to verify the reliability of such secret sources: You need to make sure that the confidential tip actually checks out.

My judgment call is a bit easier if the diffident source is also the subject---a person in an important position who ought to be willing speak for himself, on the record. For a source to insist on confidentiality under such circumstances is, to my mind, unfair and inappropriate.

As Anthony Lewis said in his Times opinion piece, the press needs the ability to promise confidentialilty, but "there are compelling interests on both sides of the problem, as many in the press are loath to admit."

I am in favor of a press shield law, protecting the anonymity of confidential sources. But it can only make sense if journalists are not promiscuous in offering anonymity, but grant it only for extremely good cause.

I like what Nicholas von Hoffman wrote about the Libby case in the Feb. 26 NY Observer:

The promise of confidentiality results in more mischief than it does news. A journalist who knows the trade will grant confidentiality to a news source about as often as a policeman draws his gun in the line of duty: It should be a rare and exceptional event....

By promising everybody and his brother confidentiality, media people have made it more difficult to defend reporters threatened with legal sanctions for refusing to divulge the name of a source.

Lewis wants Congress to pass a law giving "qualified privilege" to reporters' pledges of confidentiality, but letting the courts sort out, on a case-by-case basis, the details of which kinds of confidentiality should or should not be shielded. Judges would have to balance the importance of disclosure with the importance of protecting journalists' sources.

It seems to me that leaving such matters up to the courts is pretty much where we are right now. A qualified and deliberately vague shield law might shift the balance slightly more in favor of protection of confidential sources, but not much.

Reporters don't want Congress to tell us what we can and cannot do. But privileges come with obligations: For a shield law to work, we may have to bite the bullet and accept some restrictive standards.