Reporters In The Spotlight Get The Golden Rule Lesson

For most ordinary folks – by "ordinary," I mean non-journalists – it must be seem like an obvious point when they hear someone complaining about the way the media treats individuals. Who hasn't felt a wave of revulsion when they see some local reporter shove a microphone in the face of a man or woman and asking something like, "You've just lost your entire family in this fire, how does that make you feel?" Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, but not a real big one.

The press also gets beaten on by anyone who's been caught in a "feeding frenzy." One day you're out jogging by yourself and decide to skip town before your wedding, a few days later you can't walk by a window in your own home without some photographer's telephoto lens capturing your silhouette through your drawn shades. Anyone who's driven by the site of a news event knows that entire villages pop up, sometimes complete with satellite trucks, trailers and vendors.

In short, the media can be pretty obnoxious, rude and disruptive when given a chance, and a big enough story. Nobody knows this better than the people in the press themselves which is why it's always a little surprising to hear the same type of complaints coming from them. But it seems that almost every time their own turn on them, a journalist pulls out the old card about an out-of-control media.

Judith Miller has been under the media's spotlight like no other reporter in recent memory and appears to have found the experience just slightly better than the 85 days she spent in prison. The former New York Times reporter has just about seen all there is to see about being under the media's microscope – she's navigated press "scrums," dodged cameras swinging toward her head, read stories about her "entanglements" and absorbed more written barbs from her peers than she ever dished out.

Listening to Miller on "Larry King Live" last night, you'd think she had been hijacked on her way to the grocery store. While her critics have hardly been confined to her former institution, Miller seemed to have it at the top of her list saying, "I never considered myself at war with the newspaper, and I was stunned and saddened by those attacks. I hadn't expected them. Nobody told me they were coming." Bet there are a lot of people who never saw Judith Miller "coming" over the years.

Then there's Mary Mapes, the former CBS News producer who's been out promoting her new book and giving her side of the Memogate story. In the promotional interviews this week, Mapes has had plenty to say about her former employer too, but she's also voiced her distaste of having run the media gauntlet during the controversy a year ago. She told Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post about being in the eye of the media storm, saying that when her estranged father had accused her of trying to "promote radical feminism," it "was embarrassing. It made me feel bad. It made me feel I had absolutely no privacy left."

It wasn't the first time Mapes had the experience. She was briefly jailed for refusing to give up materials relating to interviews she had done with one of the men eventually convicted of murdering James Byrd in Texas. Here's how she describes that in her book:

"I was newly sensitive to how awful it is to be in the center of that moving, squawking, shifting and shuffling little gaggle that appears outside a courthouse whenever an interesting case is under way. It had been a long time since I'd had to do that kind of 'reporting,' and I swore anew I would never torment someone that way."