by Dallea Caldwell

Created on: November 19, 2009

Media Reports: Journalistic Integrity

Sometimes I feel like Cameron Diaz sitting at my kitchen table across from a mysterious half-faced stranger. The stranger has told me a secret. Not in confidence though - he wants me to tell. In fact, he wants me to share his secret through newspapers, websites, television screens, iPhones, twitter pages, and iPod Nanos for all the world to exploit.

At the center of the table is a laptop with an article chock full of anonymous quotes and juicy details. All I have to do is press the send button for a raise, a column, a book deal, maybe even a spot on Oprah and a Pulitzer Prize. If I tell this secret, all my career ambitions will finally be within reach. And, if I tell this secret, someone who I don't know may die.

I am considering my options. I picture myself nervously combing my pink polished fingers through my stringy blond bob-cut hair and biting the corner of my pouty mouth - doing the Cameron Diaz signature innocent look she made famous in Something About Mary.

I thoughtfully furrow my little botoxed brows until my airhead deflates. Of course, you've seen "The Box" movie trailer so you know that I push the button. Send. Twenty-four hours later it's front page news: "Valerie Plame - CIA Cover Blown", "General McCrystal's Leaked Afghan Strategy" , or "Obama is Kenyan Born".

Then, I just let the cameras roll as pandemonium unfolds. It's not just the political theatre we see in televised debates and faux radio outrage that makes it interesting. It's the real life consequences you may never see like, the threat Plame's informants and their families must now face from their hostile governments or, a growing challenge to the legitimacy of the government, the kind of which once sparked civil war.

It's like opening Pandora's box, or solving the Poltergeist puzzle, or pulling from the base of the Jenga tower. Except, it pays.

So, whether to soak a secret for all it is worth it never a question. My livelihood depends on jeopardizing not only careers like Valerie Plame's, but also military operations, hostage situations, criminal investigations, and covert activities worldwide.

Just recently, I published Congressmen Pete Hoestra's report that the Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hassan had been in correspondence with a radical Imam in Yemen. Of course, in publishing the story I probably tipped off said radical Imam that his emails were being monitored by the National Security Agency and the CIA.

I might even have effectively neutralized

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