BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Let's go back to Tuesday, 12:16 pm, Washington, D.C., the perjury trial of the vice-president's former chief of senior staff, Lewis "Scooter Libby." In the witness chair, former New York Times reporter, Judith "Judy" Miller. A Firedoglake blogger offers this moment-by-moment account. Quote, "Judy's back. Staring forward, shifts in chair, looks toward lawyers, adjusts blouse, looks at lawyers again, looks down, folds arms, leans back, turns in swivel chair, takes glasses off, looks for tissue to wipe her hands. This is not the picture of someone who is relaxed." Miller was testifying that Libby leaked her the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Libby told a grand jury he didn't. Now he says he forgot. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald says he lied. Why do we care about this trial? Three reasons: First, it reveals how the Bush administration uses strategic leaks to manage its message.

Second, it exposes the fatally cozy relationship between politicians and the press. And third, it gives news junkies the chance to mainline some high-octane gossip. Assuming most of you are news junkies, you already know the background. Allegedly, Libby's leak was part of a plot to discredit Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, a very vocal critic of the war.
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has been watching the trial. Dana, thanks for coming on.

DANA MILBANK: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I think we should begin with last Friday and the testimony of Cathy Martin, Dick Cheney's communication director. Now, that was pretty revealing of the standards and practices inside the Beltway. What did the average citizen learn about those things?
DANA MILBANK: Well, to the extent the average citizen is paying any attention to the trial which I'm sure, being very sensible, the average citizen is not doing, the average citizen would have learned that all those things that we've been whining about for the last six years are actually true. If the White House has bad news, they hold onto it and then dump it out late on a Friday night so nobody will pay attention to it on Saturday. If they have a real important issue, the first thing the senior people in the White House do is cut out all the official press spokespeople who actually deal with the press so they don't know about it. And we also learned that relatively junior aides in the White House essentially force upon these senior prominent Cabinet officials the announcements that they have to make.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We also learned, as you wrote, that the White House coddles friendly writers and freezes out others.
DANA MILBANK: I know this comes as a great surprise to you. But it came up – they were asking, well, why didn't you respond to this Nick Kristof column in The New York Times, which was sort of the first one to write about Joe Wilson, albeit not by name. And Cathy Martin's response was, well, we didn't have a really good relationship with him, and, you know, he attacked the White House all the time. That really wasn't high on our priority list. So they really sort of let their own animosity get in the way of trying to get out ahead of that story in the first place. And then we find out when the story really started getting hot, what they did was the equivalent of circling the wagons. They had, I think it was four or five prominent conservative columnists come to eat lunch with the vice-president at his house at the Naval Observatory.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What, if anything, did we learn from the testimony of former White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer? Or did he prove as impenetrable as always?

DANA MILBANK: Well, it's always been the case with Ari Fleischer that the longer you spend questioning him, the less information you leave the room with. This has been true in White House briefings for years and, in fact, it was true in the cross-examination where they tried to pin him down on parts of his story that didn't necessarily quite add up. There were apparent contradictions between what he said in court and what he told the grand jury. But he is so quick with an explanation. There was one time when they pointed out this inconsistency in his statement. He gave four explanations of why it was an inconsistency. You know, oh, well, part of it's blacked out. You can't see what it is. Well, even if I said it wrong, the context is perfectly correct. Then ultimately we find out that, in fact, the defense lawyer was playing fast and loose and he wasn't inconsistent in the first place. But he had four explanations for why if he had been inconsistent, that would be perfectly acceptable.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: He did say that he told Valerie Plame's name to then-Time reporter John Dickerson. Dickerson has written that that isn't the case.

DANA MILBANK: Well yeah. Dickerson says that, in fact, he just told Dickerson and the others who were there at the time that they should just look into it. This is all said by the dusty side of the road one day – I guess it was in Tebbe in Africa.
So it's all sort of a bit of a hazy memory. What this did bring out was, of course, the absurdly incestuous nature of the whole trial. The defense lawyer flashes on the screen, while he's questioning Ari Fleischer, a picture of Dickerson. It actually was a glamour shot, the jacket photo from his book, and then he says, you know, and I think Mr. Dickerson is here with his in the courtroom. And sure enough, there he was in the third to last row, flushing a bit and looking a bit embarrassed about the whole thing. But it happens throughout the trial. All the reporters, even the ones on the witness stand, of course, know the lawyers for the prosecution, the defense lawyers know the judge, one of the reporters knows a member of the jury. And everybody gets together and hobnobs at lunch in between the questioning. So it's all one big family reunion for the Washington establishment.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yeah. And I wonder if that is the takeaway for the attentive citizen. I know that Libby would like us to believe that the White House set him up as a scapegoat. Judith Miller of The New York Times would like us to believe that this is the First Amendment on trial. But really, isn't it the relationship between the politicians and the press that are on trial here? And doesn't it look like both are going to be found guilty?

DANA MILBANK: It doesn't show anybody in a particularly favorable light. It's a lot of sort of people using and being used and misleading and obviously being deceitful, whether or not they are guilty of some criminal offense. But there's no question that people on both sides have behaved very badly.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well Dana, thank you very much for the update.
DANA MILBANK: Happy to do it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Dana Milbank writes the Washington Sketch column for The Washington Post.