All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Game, set, match, asterisk. The contest/discussion about who or what will be Time’s “Person of the Year” is over.

It’s Steroids. Yesterday’s federal indictment of Barry Bonds only sealed the deal.

From the home run king to 2000 Olympic champion Marion Jones’s public confession to professional wrestler Chris Benoit’s double murder-suicide to the forthcoming George Mitchell investigation to Americas competitive bicyclists, steroids have been in the news every month of this year, casting a pall over the sports worlds and American culture as a whole.

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While we're on the subject of controversies surrounding leaks and anonymous sources, there's a substantial update in the story of two reporters (not located in Washington) who faced jail for failing to comply with a subpoena and reveal their source for several stories.

They're not facing jail anymore.

Troy Ellerman has admitted to leaking secret grand jury testimony from baseball players in the BALCO steroids case to San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams. The Department of Justice says the reporters' subpoenas will be withdrawn and their testimony is expected to be rendered moot by the judge in the leak investigation case.

Ellerman represented BALCO in the original case and he is pleading guilty to violating a judge's order not to disclose the transcripts. He could be sentenced to up to two years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines.

Adding insult to injury, the Chronicle reports that "while he was secretly leaking the transcripts, Ellerman acknowledged Wednesday, he was publicly complaining to a federal judge about the leaks, and even filed a motion in October 2004 to dismiss charges, arguing that the disclosures made a fair trial 'practically impossible.'"

It's obviously a good outcome for the reporters involved (jail would have been kind of a downer.) But one media watcher reveals a glitch.

Mark Feldstein, a George Washington University professor and journalism historian who is often procured to comment on such issues, had this to say to the Chronicle: "Someone who may be thinking about leaking information to the press may think twice if he knows he's going to go to jail."

Well, there’s been a somewhat ironic turn of events in the Justice Department’s investigation of how two San Francisco Chronicle reporters obtained and reported secret testimony from a grand jury investigation into steroid use in baseball. Prosecutors have issued subpoenas that would require San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams to reveal the identity of sources who provided them with transcripts of grand jury testimony, which they later published in The Chronicle.

“About eight pages of a 51-page government brief filed in federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday were electronically blacked out to protect what prosecutors said was sensitive material concerning a grand jury's investigation into steroid use in baseball,” wrote The New York Times today.

So where’s the irony?

As New York Sun reporter Josh Gerstein discovered first and reported in an article yesterday, “In a technical flub that has flummoxed the Justice Department before, the computer-generated filing yesterday used an ineffective method of blacking out the text of portions not to be released to the public. As a result, the redacted portions could be easily read by copying them into a word processing program.”

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