Post-Star — Senate must vote on shield law

• By: ASNE staff
• On: 08/23/2010 07:13:00
• In: Shield law editorials

The Post-Star, Glen Falls, N.Y.
August 10, 2010

“President George W. Bush angrily hung up the telephone, emphatically ending a tense conversation with his father, the former president of the United States, George Herbert Walker Bush.

It was 2003, and the argument between the forty-first and forty-third presidents of the United States was the culmination of a prolonged, if very secret, period of friction between the father and son. While the exact details of this conversation are known only to the two men, several highly placed sources say that the argument was related to the misgivings Bush’s father felt at the time about the way in which George W. Bush was running his administration.”

So begins the book, “State of Play: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” by Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist James Risen, who uncovered the inner workings of the Bush administration, its questionable relationship with the CIA, and the facts surrounding the spy agency’s sharing of sensitive nuclear technology with Iran in a failed attempt to provide that country with false information.

In a forward to the book, Risen said his investigation would not have been possible without the use of anonymous sources and his ability to protect them. And without his investigation, the American people would have been deprived of vital insight into presidential decision-making and the role of federal agencies, operating in secret, in shaping foreign policy.

Four years after his book was published, Mr. Risen continues to be dogged by the federal government, which under President Obama resurrected a subpoena seeking the identity of his sources.

Mr. Risen is just one of many journalists around the country who are being harassed, threatened and even jailed by the federal government for protecting sources without whom their investigations of important government matters would not have been possible.

The losers in the government’s failure to protect journalists and their sources are not the journalists. The losers are the American people.

So it’s the American people who should be as outraged as anyone about the failure of the U.S. Senate to bring up for a vote the “Free Flow of Information Act” more than eight months after the Senate Judiciary Committee approved it by a bipartisan vote and more than a year after the House of Representatives passed its companion bill by voice vote.

The Act (Senate Bill S.448) would shield reporters from being forced by the federal government to reveal the identities of anonymous sources and whistleblowers in all but the most extreme circumstances, giving journalists the freedom they need to investigate government and corporate waste, fraud and illegal activity.

The bill takes great steps to ensure that national security interests are protected, through broad exceptions for when government seeks to prevent terrorist attacks and takes other actions to protect national security.

It also clears up ambiguous language in existing shield laws, and creates uniform language that can be easily and fairly interpreted across all federal jurisdictions and courts.

The bill, which has bipartisan support in both houses of Congress, has been the product of nearly seven years of negotiations and compromises that included a last-minute roadblock, then a withdrawal of objections, from the Obama administration last November.

U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, our senior senator, is one of the bill’s main sponsors and has been actively pushing for the bill’s passage for years. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand supported the measure when she was our representative in the House and is listed as a co-sponsor of the current Senate version. And U.S. Rep. Scott Murphy, D-Glens Falls, voted for the bill when it came for a vote in the House last year.

Yet despite the bipartisan support of top Democrats and Republicans and our own local representatives and despite the urging of more than 70 media companies and journalism groups, including the American Society of News Editors the bill continues to languish in the Senate.

With the legislative calendar filling up quickly and with fall elections on the horizon, this bill needs to be brought to the floor for two votes one that would end debate and force an up-or-down vote, and the second vote in favor of the actual bill.

This law not only protects journalists and their sources, it protects all of us by allowing the kind of reporting that keeps us informed about malfeasance in government and the corporate world.

Please e-mail or call the Senate leadership and our state’s U.S. senators and urge them to push for passage of this most important piece of legislation.

Local editorials represent the opinion of The Post-Star editorial board, which consists of Publisher Rick Emanuel, Editor Ken Tingley, Editorial Page Editor Mark Mahoney and citizen member Gail Infante.