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Boston Globe — Pressed freedom
- By: ASNE staff
- On: 05/08/2008 14:11:13
- In: Shield law editorials
By Kevin Cullen
The Boston Globe
May 8, 2008
Some years ago, when Toni Locy was a reporter for this newspaper, she wrote stories documenting that some members of the Boston Police Department weren't doing their jobs very well.
The cops were furious and some
By Kevin Cullen
The Boston Globe
May 8, 2008
Some years ago, when Toni Locy was a reporter for this newspaper, she wrote stories documenting that some members of the Boston Police Department weren't doing their jobs very well.
The cops were furious and some put a picket line up outside the Globe. In our business, that's a compliment. And for all their huffing and puffing, the department ended up adopting reforms that Locy suggested were needed.
Locy was always a good, tough-nosed journalist, always in high heels and high spirits. She is now in danger of becoming a very broke and incarcerated journalist. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., named Reggie Walton wants to bankrupt her and throw her in jail because she won't give up her sources.
Now, I realize that newspaper reporters are about as popular with the general public as the tax man. But that doesn't make what Reggie Walton wants to do to Toni Locy right, and there's plenty that makes it wrong and downright scary.
In 2003, Locy's editors at USA Today, where she was then working, asked her to do an update on Stephen Hatfill, a former Army scientist and expert on germ warfare who had been identified by US Attorney General John Ashcroft as a "person of interest" in the FBI investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks that left five people dead.
Her story, which quoted unnamed government officials, was not the first written about Hatfill. It ran inside the paper.
Hatfill sued the Justice Department, saying government leaks had ruined his reputation. Walton ordered Locy to identify her sources or pay fines of up to $5,000 a day. He ordered that nobody else can help her pay - not USA Today, not her family or friends, nobody.
Locy spent 25 years as a reporter, which means she has no money. She is now a journalism professor, which means she has less.
She was working at the Daily News in Philadelphia years ago when she heard that Nicky Scarfo was organizing a fund-raiser for his defense fund. Little Nicky was under indictment because he ran the local franchise of a fraternal organization known as the Mafia. Little Nicky had hired a Frank Sinatra impersonator to sing at the fund-raiser, which was a beautiful thing, but he had to call it off after Locy put his plans in the paper.
"Nicky Scarfo can have a defense fund," Locy said. "Scooter Libby can have a defense fund. But I can't have a defense fund."
Is this a great country, or what? Scooter Libby can lie for an administration that had already lied us into a needless war, get a free pass from the guy who runs that administration, and we're going to throw Locy in jail?
Judge Walton said, from the bench, that he hoped his ruining Locy would make other government officials less likely to talk to reporters.
That's nice. The last time I checked, the country is a mess not because the press has too much power, but because the government does.
If Hatfill's reputation was ruined by FBI leaks, it was ruined long before Locy wrote a single word about the case. She can't remember who told her what for the story.
"If it was a scoop, I would remember," she said. "But it was just a routine story."
Her story was skeptical in tone, raising as many questions about the FBI's behavior as about Hatfill. Not only is this a case of shooting the messenger, they're shooting the wrong messenger.
The legal fatwa against Toni Locy is arbitrary and Orwellian, and if successful will make reporters even less likely to fulfill their most important role in a democracy: keeping an eye on the government.
When she stands before the US Court of Appeals in Washington tomorrow, Locy will not be wearing sensible shoes because she doesn't own any. That court has already sensibly stayed the fines against her. It can do another sensible thing and throw this whole ridiculous thing out.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist.