Poynter on the Record

The San Francisco Chronicle and two of its reporters were subpoenaed [Friday, May 5] to testify before a federal grand jury about leaked court documents used as the basis for articles that linked well-known athletes to the use of performance-enhancing drugs.

The Chronicle articles by Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, based in part on secret grand jury transcripts, rocked Major League Baseball, leading to congressional hearings and an overhaul of drug testing in the sport. Several elite athletes were enveloped in the controversy, including Giants' star Barry Bonds, who is closing in on Babe Ruth's career home run mark.

The subpoenas are the latest examples of an increasingly common strategy by federal prosecutors to force reporters to reveal their confidential sources or be cited for contempt of court. Last year, a reporter for The New York Times, Judith Miller, went to jail before eventually naming Vice President Dick Cheney's then-chief of staff as the person who told her the identity of CIA operative Valerie Wilson.

The subpoenas, issued at the behest of the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, call for Fainaru-Wada and Williams to provide any grand jury transcripts in their possession related to the investigation into the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, a nutritional supplement company in Burlingame that distributed performance-enhancing drugs...

The reporters also are being asked to provide the packaging in which they received any transcripts, as well as any information they have regarding the identity of the person or persons who leaked the documents to the newspaper. ...

"It's a dangerous trend,'' said Aly Colón, an ethics instructor at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists. "The public at large and the legal community may rue it in the long term."

"Journalists need an independence to not be an instrument of government,'' he said. "When prosecutors can use journalists as an extension of the prosecutorial arm, it creates a great risk for journalists."