BOB GARFIELD: One journalist with no bridges to build with the current administration is syndicated columnist and TV personality Robert Novak, the so-called "Prince of Darkness." Novak has built a mini-media empire by tapping highly-placed sources for news and gossip that have won him fame, fortune and, recently, a great deal of animus after he outed undercover CIA official Valerie Plame via a politically-motivated White House leak.
The search for the leaker is the subject of a federal investigation that has earned contempt of court convictions for two prominent journalists, but so far, Novak himself plies his trade with no apparent consequences. When Washington Monthly editor Amy Sullivan sat with Novak recently, she wasn't even permitted to raise the Plame matter on pain of having the interview instantly canceled. She joins us now. Amy, welcome to OTM.

AMY SULLIVAN: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

BOB GARFIELD: First, let's discuss the Plame issue. Is he getting a free ride from his colleagues in the Washington press corps?

AMY SULLIVAN:I think, on balance, you'd have to say that he is. Bob Novak has a pretty important reputation in Washington - much of it deserved. He is still, after 40-something years of writing this column, writing three columns a week and breaking news in every single one of them. It takes a lot of work and a lot of phone calling and a lot of shoe leather reporting to do that. So, he has a well-earned reputation as a reporter.
But he has been able to coast on that through quite a few ethical slips that would, I think, do in any other reporter.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, give me some examples.

AMY SULLIVAN:One of the incidents that came up earliest in Novak's career was a quote that he reported in one of his columns and attributed it to a senator, saying that George McGovern's politics could be characterized as all about acid, amnesty and abortion, which is kind of catchy and got around town pretty quickly and was repeated by a lot of people. Turns out that nobody actually ever said that.
Another example of that was in the late '80s when he helped promote a rumor that then-house speaker Tom Foley was gay, leading eventually to Foley going in front of a national press conference and declaring that he was not, in fact, a homosexual. It was kind of a measure of Novak's column that everybody had read it and everybody started to believe it.

BOB GARFIELD: And he was subsequently defeated in his own congressional district. In your piece you also mentioned suggestions that Novak has used his column to flog books from a Washington publishing house that he has I'd say less than an arm's length relationship with.

AMY SULLIVAN:Novak's son, Alex, is the head of marketing for Regnery Publishing, which among other things is the publisher of the book by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Only after he was really pushed, he disclosed the fact that his son works there, but he has also over the past I think five or six years continued to promote and positively review Regnery books without ever disclosing the fact that the guy who owns Regnery, Tom Phillips, publishes Novak's newsletter that goes out for a subscription of almost 300 dollars a year to many subscribers.

BOB GARFIELD: Maybe most interestingly in the list of sort of eyebrow-raising incidents was his use as a source an FBI counter-espionage agent who turned out to be a spy for the Soviets. Tell me that story.

AMY SULLIVAN:Well, among many of the anti-Clinton columns that Novak ran in the 1990s, one was about Janet Reno and some FBI agents who were quite upset with Reno. One of those happened to be Robert Hansen, who we know now was later discovered to be a spy and was convicted as a traitor. It's one of the most extreme examples of Novak not being terribly discerning in who he uses as his sources.
But I think it's illustrative of the fact that he will go for the best story, regardless of whether the information is necessarily accurate and regardless of who his source is.

BOB GARFIELD: Novak once was sued for libel, and the court found in his favor because it said in its words, a columnist is entitled to the use of "reckless hyperbole" in making a case. Now, Novak is mainly a reporter. Is this court opinion just the world's best get-out-of-jail-free for someone who does a column like his?

AMY SULLIVAN:It's not a bad deal. If he's pushed on whether he really has the facts to be able to report something, then he's a reporter, and people tend to back off, because everybody knows Bob Novak has the best sources in town. On the other hand, if he's being sued for libel, as in this case, he can put on his columnist hat and say, "Come on. Give me a little license here."

BOB GARFIELD: So Bob Novak is essentially answerable to nobody. He, he doesn't have an editor, because he's an independent syndicated columnist, and he - he's the executive producer of his own TV show. If Bob Novak is playing fast and loose with journalistic ethics, what's to be done about it?

AMY SULLIVAN:Well, as you point out, there's very little that can be done, because as a syndicated columnist, he really doesn't have much of an editor for his columns. If a newspaper doesn't like it, they could ask him to change some of the, the facts in the columns, but they don't, and so their really only option is to stop running his column, and given that he's one of the five most widely read columnists in the country, they're unlikely to want to annoy their readers by dropping his column.
CNN could, in theory, crack down when he says things on it that are not necessarily backed up by fact or sources, but he's one of the staples of their conservative programming particularly. He's been on CNN since the very first weekend it started, and they're proud of him.

BOB GARFIELD: Respond to my assertion. I believe that there are 360 newspaper editors who continue to run his column who have a lot to answer for. Do you agree?

AMY SULLIVAN:I think the fact that Novak continues to be run in 360 newspapers more than a year after this column ran printing Valerie Plame's name and that virtually no one has raised any questions about the propriety of what he did is surprising and quite disappointing. It's hard to think of another reporter or another columnist in American journalism who would be able to do something like this and then not be questioned on it.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, Amy, thank you very much.

AMY SULLIVAN: Thank you. It's my pleasure.

BOB GARFIELD: Amy Sullivan is an editor of the Washington Monthly. Her piece about Robert Novak was titled Bob in Paradise.
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