"Ms. Miller has said she will go to jail rather than testify"
At least in Judith Miller's case, I now have the answer to my question:
The United States Supreme Court declined [Monday] to hear the cases of two reporters facing up to 18 months in jail for refusing to testify about conversations with their confidential sources.The case now returns to Federal District Court in Washington, where Judge Thomas F. Hogan will hear arguments on Wednesday about when and where the reporters, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, will begin to serve their time.
Ms. Miller has said she will go to jail rather than testify. "Journalists simply cannot do their jobs without being able to commit to sources that they won't be identified," she said in a statement [Monday]. "Such protection is critical to the free flow of information in a democracy."
But as Professor Bainbridge notes, this might not be the best time for reporters to assert a need to keep sources confidential:
A newspaper investigation of a former columnist for The Sacramento Bee could not verify 43 sources she used in a sampling of 12 years of her work.Diana Griego Erwin resigned May 11 as she came under scrutiny about the existence of people she quoted.