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Buffalo News — Time to pass a shield law

State already protects news-gathering, but a federal measure still is needed

The Buffalo (N.Y.) News
January 5, 2009

When President Bush leaves office this month, he will leave a trail strewn with bad decisions that his successor will have to clean up. One of the

State already protects news-gathering, but a federal measure still is needed

The Buffalo (N.Y.) News
January 5, 2009

When President Bush leaves office this month, he will leave a trail strewn with bad decisions that his successor will have to clean up. One of the most important to the long-term health of the country is for President-elect Barack Obama to approve a federal shield law for reporters.

That’s a relatively quick and easy step, one that will put the country back on the side of its Founding Fathers.

Shield laws protect journalists from being forced to disclose confidential sources to courts and law enforcement agencies. Most states, including New York, have such laws, but the federal government doesn’t. The result, during the Bush administration, has been the jailing of at least one reporter and threats against others as courts have pressured journalists to cough up information that police wanted but couldn’t get.

That is intolerable in a free society, a fact that bipartisan congressional majorities which have included then-Sen. Obama have acknowledged. The only reason a bill hasn’t yet passed is because Senate Republicans have blocked all efforts, which Bush had threatened to veto, anyway.

Now things have changed. With fewer Republicans in the Senate and an incoming president who has supported a federal shield law, prospects for enacting a measure are significantly improved.

Shield laws help reporters do their jobs, but reporters aren’t the primary beneficiaries. The Founders understood that a free press is central to the survival of a democracy. They understood it well enough that freedom of the press was enshrined in the Bill of Rights indeed, it appears in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Without press freedom, the Watergate scandal likely would never have been exposed. Nor would revelations about torture during the war in Iraq, the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison and the revelations of secret wire taps.

Not that the federal government wasn’t up to trying. A special prosecutor relentlessly pursued journalists as he worked to uncover who in the Bush administration had blown the cover of former CIA agent Valerie Plame. One, then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller, went to jail for nearly three months before agreeing to reveal her source.

There may be legitimate restrictions to place on a federal shield law. In fact, caveats regarding such issues as national security were included in recent efforts. But the time has come, more than 200 years later, to recognize that the Founders knew what they were doing when they gave special protections to the press. Obama should make a shield law an early goal of his administration.

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