Journalists all over the country are rallying behind comrades Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, who were sentenced to jail Thursday after refusing to say who leaked them Barry Bonds' grand jury testimony.
Journalists are thinking of them as two good men.
Me? I'm thinking of A Few Good Men. I'm thinking of the court scene when Tom Cruise is needling Kiefer Sutherland on the witness stand about a marine's need to follow every single order, no matter how inane.
Sutherland: Corporal Dawson disobeyed an order.
Cruise: Yeah, but it wasn't an order, was it? After all, it's peacetime. He wasn't being asked to secure a hill or advance on a beachhead. I mean, surely a Marine of Dawson's intelligence can be trusted to determine on his own, which are the really important orders, and which orders might, say, be morally questionable. ... Lt. Kendrick? Can he? Can Corporal Dawson determine on his own which orders he's gonna follow?
Sutherland: No, he can not.
Exactly. Orders are orders, and laws are laws. And whether you like it or not, whoever leaked that testimony broke the law. And now, by refusing a judge's orders to identify their source, Fainaru-Wada and Williams are in contempt of court. That, too, is the law.
Is it good, this law? Not in this case, no. Any law that helps send Williams and Fainaru-Wada to jail while the illegal-steroid-using players they wrote about -- specifically, Bonds -- are allowed not only to remain free but to keep playing ... well, that's a bad law.
But it's a law -- a real law, and U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White wasn't placed into his role of authority to decide which laws he's going to follow and which he's going to ignore. If White had the discretion to pick and choose the laws he's going to uphold, so would other judges. Soon the laws of America wouldn't be the laws of America. It would invite legal anarchy. Sounds over the top, I know. But it's true. Just because you don't like that point doesn't make it invalid.
Hey, I hate the point too. Williams and Fainaru-Wada are good guys in this story. They're certainly among the best journalists of our generation and worthy of a Pulitzer Prize, which is my profession's version of the Heisman Trophy or MVP. I am in awe of their reporting on this story, and agree with their decision not to give up their source.
For this story to be reported, though, someone had to break the law. Fainaru-Wada and Williams got their hands on testimony they weren't legally entitled to get, and even if they do spend the next 18 months in jail, I'm guessing they'd do it all over again if given the chance. What they did was real, old-school journalism, and it was fabulous.
What they're doing now, refusing to give up their source, is beyond fabulous. It's gutsier than anything most of us -- including me -- will ever do. Even so, Judge White cannot set a dangerous precedent by going easy on the journalists.
Next time there's a secret grand jury testimony, what if the target isn't a muscular jerk of a baseball player but a mobster? And what if the testimony isn't about something relatively benign like a syringe to the buttocks, but about something evil like murder? And what if, because the testimony was leaked to a newspaper, the witness who testified against the mobster gets killed in retaliation?
