MEDIA ADVISORY

Walter Pincus of the Washington Post and Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times will participate in a panel discussion titled "Anonymous Sources: Leaks, Accountability and the First Amendment" with Kathleen Sullivan, former dean of Stanford Law School, at 3 p.m. Monday, May 8, in Annenberg Auditorium. The event, sponsored by the Department of Communication, is free and open to the public.

Since 2004, Drogin has been held in contempt of a federal court for refusing to name confidential sources in his coverage of Wen Ho Lee, a former nuclear-weapons scientist once accused of being a spy. The former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist is suing a group of reporters, including Drogin, to obtain the names of confidential government sources who leaked information that landed him in solitary confinement in 1999. Lee was held without bail until September 2000, when he accepted a plea bargain from the federal government. Pincus is being pursued by Lee's attorneys as well, but his case is moving separately through the courts. Meanwhile, Pincus also has been subpoenaed in the Valerie Plame leak case.

Drogin has covered national security and intelligence in the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times since 1998. Previously, he was a foreign correspondent in Southeast Asia and South Africa and a national correspondent based in New York. Drogin has won or shared numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, an Overseas Press Club Award and a George Polk Award. Drogin attended Oberlin College and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and he was a Knight Fellow at Stanford in 1997-98. He currently is on leave from the Times to write Curveball, a book on the pre-war intelligence in Iraq.

Pincus, a graduate of Yale University and Georgetown University Law Center, began his journalism career in 1954 as a copyboy for the New York Times prior to being drafted into the Army, where he served two years in the Counterintelligence Corps. He then worked at the Wall Street Journal and later was Washington correspondent for three North Carolina newspapers. In 1962, Pincus spent 18 months on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, running an investigation for its chairman, Sen. J. W. Fulbright, D-Ark., on foreign government lobbying. He joined the Washington Post in 1966. He later worked for a few years as executive editor of The New Republic before returning to the Washington Post.

At the Post, Pincus has covered national security affairs including nuclear weapons and intelligence for 25 years. He has won several awards including a Page One Award, a Polk Award, an Emmy for television writing and, with four other Post reporters, a Pulitzer Prize.

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