The year for a shield law
STEADILY, prosecutors and plaintiffs are showing an increasing desire to make their cases on the backs of reporters, poking into their confidential notes and information, often obtained with the promise of anonymity. And judges are increasingly turning the screws by threatening journalists with jail time unless they break that promise. Too often, judges are carrying out the threat.
It is a travesty when reporters lose their personal freedom to uphold the freedom of the press that Thomas Jefferson believed fundamental.
Even more deplorable is the loss of information that should flow to the public. Most news developed by enterprising reporters is the product of hard work, using public information and on-the-record interviews. But a number of stories -- including some very significant ones -- derive from sources who provide information that should be public, but who risk their jobs in giving the material to reporters. It is crucial that such sources believe reporters will keep their identity secret. If not, they simply will not come forward with the information, and the public will lose.
This is the reason Congress should pass a journalists' shield law such as the one set to be filed today.
As in the past, this is a bipartisan issue. The lead sponsor is Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, and Republican Senators Richard Lugar and Arlen Specter are supporters. Still, the proposal was shunted aside when Republicans controlled Congress. This year, with the active support of John Conyers, the Judiciary Committee chairman in the House, and Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut among other Democrats, the bill should win passage in both houses.
The need is certainly there. The Lewis Libby case, in which reporters became witnesses at trial, and the California case that sent Joshua Wolf, a video blogger, to federal prison for a record 226 days, have focused attention on reporters and their duties. Both these cases were murky. Not all of the reporters in the Libby case were blameless. And Wolf, unaffiliated with an established news organization, was questioned as to whether he was a reporter at all.
But both cases illustrate the extent to which prosecutors and judges are now willing to slap a jail sentence on uncooperative news gatherers. In Wolf's case, federal agents went to extraordinary lengths, dragging him into federal court even though the crime he taped -- the burning of a police car -- was essentially a local matter.
The Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press reports that President Bush's Justice Department has issued 65 subpoenas to journalists, an extraordinary number. And David Hudson at the First Amendment Center at Vanderbuilt University, which tracks cases in which reporters are threatened with court sanctions, reports "an influx in the last three years."
It is past time for Congress to act -- not to protect reporters, but to defend the free flow of information vital to democracy.
