Congress must protect journalists and their sources

WASHINGTON — When you spend a week in the nation's capital for the annual convention of newspaper editors, you get to hear the president, and Condi Rice, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and various others who are generous enough to come and explain their policies.

But a lot of the really inside dope comes from quiet dinners and lunches and drinks with old well-placed friends in the administration and Congress and journalism who tell you who is misbehaving, who's heading for a fall, who's feuding with whom, and so on. It's understood that all this is off the record, an exchange of useful background information between trusted friends and reliable sources. These sources will remain anonymous to anyone who reads what the journalist may write. They hold positions that make it inadvisable, perhaps even impossible, for them to be quoted by name. A journalist who burns a source, once the compact of confidentiality is made, is toast, professionally, and he should be.

A good example right now is the story of Tom DeLay, the Republican House majority leader embattled in accusations of scandal. A couple of prominent Republican politicians have called for his resignation, but most of his Republican colleagues are diplomatically silent. Publicly the president told editors he was looking forward to continuing to work with him. But privately, and with an understanding of confidentiality, powerful members of Congress tell you DeLay is unlikely to survive, and that though the president needs him politically, there's no love lost between them. Anonymous sources? Absolutely. Is this useful? Absolutely. Would I betray them? Absolutely not.

In an ideal world, all sources would be identified by name in newspaper stories. Ben Bradlee, the former editor of the Washington Post, once tried to enforce that. His edict, as I recall, lasted for just a few days. The Post's sources clammed up, the public was ill-served, and the conclusion was that, especially in a city like Washington, a newspaper that declined to give confidentiality to sources it deemed reliable could not effectively operate.