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Washington
Newsroom Magazine supports a national shield law to protect journalists from governmental interdiction and/or court orders that restrict journalistic freedoms.
Such a law must free journalists from threat of litigation, strictly limit governmental rights to place them under duress by means of unwarranted subpoena, fines, or imprisonment for not revealing confidential sources necessary to a journalist’s freedom of speech and a press free to question those who govern and agencies of governance.
Free Flow of Information Act
For months the Free Flow of Information Act, a bipartisan press shield bill backed by Senators Arlen Specter, Charles Schumer, Lindsey Graham, and others, has been awaiting action in the U.S. Senate. Now that the Obama Administration has come out in support of the most recent Senate version of the bill, it’s time to move that bill out of committee and make it into law.
Were the bill still before the Senate Judiciary Committee to become law it would enable federal judges to reject subpoenas against journalists in cases where a federal judge finds the public’s right to know transcends the government’s right to demand that a journalist’s source(s) be revealed. The proposed law would only apply in federal courts — in recognition that some 36 states already have in place some sort of shield law.
Today, any reporter can be summarily hauled into federal court in any case where the government demands that he or she reveal sources, documents, notes or other means of information passing, undergoing journalistic inquiry relating to subject litigation.
Without assurance of anonymity for sources within government, it is all but impossible for any journalist to gain the trust of people who have witnessed, have information, or who might proffer documents about which the general public has a significant interest.l
The House bill that passed last March identified areas where significant limitations on journalistic freedom might be required in the best interests of national security. In it’s present form, the Senate bill also expressly excludes any shield in cases that concern terrorist or other activities that put the United States at risk.
The enactment of a press shield law is very important today — not just to journalists, but to government and ordinary Americans as well for the proposed legislation would establish a clear and measured right of reporters to not reveal names or other details of confidential sources in most, but not all matters.
We are not at all assured that such limitations are either needed, nor for that matter, constitutional, but we do support the notion that journalists need more formal protections in reportorial activities that serve to protect the public from unwarranted limitations on journalistic free speech.
Without reporters and news organizations being able to protect confidential sources, many important stories about illegal, bureaucratic or embarrassing actions that someone in government seeks to conceal would never see the light of day. Accordingly, Newsroom Magazine believes that journalistic freedom, and freedom of the press, warrants passage of a strong press shield law that ensures that all news media are and remain free to report information obtained from confidential sources.
Accordingly, Newsroom Magazine supports a national shield law that provides legal certainty, protection from governmental interference, or court actions that would restrict journalist freedoms, or otherwise place news gatherers under duress or from fines or imprisonment for protecting their confidential sources. Such rights are instrumental to, and necessary to ensure honest, relevant, probative and credible journalism. We therefore believe that a national law is needed to protect the public’s right to know.