Off the Record

Confidentiality has become a weapon in the White House's war on the press, a war fought with the unwitting complicity of the press itself. Norman Pearlstine takes us behind the scenes of one of the most controversial courtroom dramas of our time. When Pearlstine-as editor in chief of Time Inc.-agreed to give prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald a reporter's notes of a conversation with a "confidential source," he was vilified for betraying the freedom of the press. But Pearlstine shows that "Plamegate" was not the clear case it seemed to be. In his "vigorously written" inside story (The Washington Post), Pearlstine daringly challenges the conventional wisdom that freedom of the press is an absolute.