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News-Press — Help press do its job for public

The News-Press, Fort Myers, Fla.
August 9, 2010

If journalists are going to perform the essential service of investigating wrong-doing and digging up stories the public needs to read, they must - in limited circumstances - protect the identity of their sources.

The News-Press, Fort Myers, Fla.
August 9, 2010

If journalists are going to perform the essential service of investigating wrong-doing and digging up stories the public needs to read, they must - in limited circumstances - protect the identity of their sources.

Otherwise, stories of vital public interest will go unreported.

Forty-nine states and the District of Columbia already offer some degree of such protection (all but Wyoming), but a federal "shield law" is badly needed.

Federal prosecutors have increasingly been dragging reporters into court to browbeat their sources out of them, even sending them to jail, instead of doing the essential investigative work themselves. Civil litigants seeking to smother unfavorable news coverage have also tried to use the courts to force reporters to reveal their sources.

This has a chilling effect on investigative journalism, which is needed when the authorities have failed to address wrongdoing by the government or private parties.

A bipartisan federal reporters shield law, S 448, is pending in the Senate, its fate complicated by the recent release on the Wiki- Leaks website of thousands of pages of classified government documents on the war in Afghanistan.

The legislation already addressed the national security issue. The bill allows law enforcement officials to get the information they need to investigate and prosecute crimes when national security is at stake. But the bill also gives reporters faced with subpoenas the opportunity to ask a judge to quash the subpoena rather than fining or jailing them for contempt of court.

The shield law is not to protect the dumping of raw data on the Internet, as Wikileaks did. That's not the same as what the New York Times and other key newspapers did with stories based on the documents. They checked facts, did additional research, got other viewpoints, evaluated the motives of the sources and worked to avoid any harm to national security.

It's time for the Senate to act. This legislation has been fine-tuned for about six years now, to balance the important interests at stake and to protect national security.

Sixty votes are needed for cloture to close debate and bring the issue finally to an up-or-down vote. This bill passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last year by a 14-5 bipartisan margin. Similar legislation has passed the House twice by large margins. Congressman Connie Mack IV, R-Fort Myers, supported it.

Urge our senators to vote for cloture, and vote for the bill.

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