By Jerry Ceppos

    On almost every subject, media consumers think they’re from Mars and journalists are from Venus. That’s especially true on the subject of confidential sources, which the public generally doesn’t understand and we generally don’t explain.
    The ultimate example is the case of San Francisco Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, who broke story after story about Barry Bonds and the BALCO steroid investigation. (Full disclosure: I competed against the Chronicle for years when I worked for the San Jose Mercury News and its then-owner, Knight Ridder.)
    Like almost every other journalist, I exhaled when their apparent source, defense lawyer Troy Ellerman, said that he had leaked grand-jury transcripts to the reporters. That took them off the hook—even though they haven’t acknowledged that Ellerman was the source—and, as a result, they no longer, face time in jail.
In a nutshell, here’s what happened: Ellerman leaked the material to the Chronicle, then, shockingly, said that the court should drop the case against a BALCO client, “claiming that the Chronicle disclosures compromised his client’s right to a fair trial!” The exclamation mark (and the rest of the quote) are from Jack Shafer at Slate, who is appalled that many journalists will take information from just about anyone, regardless of the leaker’s motivation.
    Shafer says that most of us are part of the “First Amendment Industrial Complex (FAIC)”: “It’s FAIC dogma that it’s OK in principle for journalists to publish information of vital public concern that other people have broken the law to obtain or share.”
A    s a member in good standing of FAIC, I have to say that I probably would have jumped at the chance to read the grand-jury testimony. Peter Scheer, the executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition and a key member of the FAIC, agrees. But Scheer raises a fundamental, troubling question:
    “…Should the reporters have exposed Ellerman when he lied to the court and claimed that the leaks—his leaks—deprived his clients’ right to a fair trial?” Scheer says no. I’m not so sure. Journalists would have exposed anyone else who engaged in such chicanery. Were the reporters bound not to expose him because they had quoted from his documents? I’m not sure. I’d love to read your views.