Well, the shit finally hit the fan.

Judy does jailtime. Matt flies the Coop.

I wish I could rule as definitively as Tom Hogan did about how I feel, but the fact is we just don't have enough info (yet?) about exactly what the fuck happened here.

We're left with a bunch of hypotheticals...which translates into hours of speculation from blowhard wannabe pundits on CNN and MSNBC.

As Rosa Brooks pointed out yesterday, there can be instances where it's ethical to reneg on a promise of anonymity to a source. Upholding that promise is not a moral absolute.

Is the anonymous source a legit whistle blower? Or did he/she deceive the reporter at the moment the anonymity promise was made, hiding a deeper intent and motivation that was only made evident later?

One of the cardinal rules of journalism - and unfortunately there seems to be very few (one of the problems with the profession's tarnished image) - is that you never let a source hide behind anonymity if they've got a bone to pick. I don't see why that wouldn't apply retroactively.

That said...these "retroactive" hypothetical situations seem pretty rare. Who knows? I suspect that if we knew the facts, the ethical litmus test probably would not justify Miller outing her sources in this case. So it's not fun watching Judy get escorted off to the swinger, while that asshole Bob Novak keeps his cushy CNN seat.

Howard Kurtz writes today that Joe Wilson and others have alleged that Miller's treatment, versus Novak's, implies retaliation against the NY Times for publishing Wilson's critical editorial.

What's more interesting though is that Miller's reporting in the NY Times helped the administration bolster its case for renewed war in Iraq. Miller was in tight with Ahmed Chalabi...and he later turned out to be a shoddy source, at best. The NY Times wound up printing corrections to Miller's articles in the lead up to war, and she had a nice big piece of humble pie.

I wrote a term paper about this back in the fall - the two faces of Judith Miller: media martyr and Bush administration pawn. Brooks' piece in the LA Times yesterday takes a similar angle.

Even though I beat her to the punch by 8 months, I get to write for a professor; she gets to write for several million people. It's a fun reminder that at the end of the day I'm just a lowly J-school grad student. What the fuck do I know.

Well anyways, thanks to the two people who read this to the end. We now return to your regularly scheduled programming on the London bombings.