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Daytona Beach News-Journal — Federal shield law

Protecting media against government intimidation

The Daytona Beach (Fla.) News-Journal
Feb. 21, 2008

Between 2001 and 2006, the Justice Department approved 65 subpoenas of reporters. In most cases, the reporters had to choose between cooperating with the g

Protecting media against government intimidation

The Daytona Beach (Fla.) News-Journal
Feb. 21, 2008

Between 2001 and 2006, the Justice Department approved 65 subpoenas of reporters. In most cases, the reporters had to choose between cooperating with the government by betraying confidential sources or face contempt charges and jail time.

Reporters and news organizations shouldn't have to face that dilemma except in the rarest of circumstances -- when authorities have absolutely no other way to get the information they're seeking except through the reporters, and only when there's a compelling reason to force reporters to disclose the information. Just because the government is interested in a reporter's information isn't enough.

Reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada of the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, chose to go to jail rather than reveal who leaked them Barry Bonds' steroid-related grand jury testimony. The reporters averted jail when an attorney in the case admitted leaking the testimony. But why was the government using its subpoena power in a sports-related case that didn't remotely impact national security? On the other hand, several reporters agreed to testify in the case of Valerie Plame, who lost her cover as a CIA agent when her identity was revealed in a newspaper column.

In those cases and others, the reporters probably would not faced testifying if a qualified federal shield law were in place. About 34 states, including Florida, have shield laws. But they don't apply in federal cases. U.S. Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., has spent years championing just such a measure. Last October, the measure passed the House overwhelmingly, 398-21. It's now in the Senate's hands -- where Majority Leader Harry Reid has yet to schedule a vote.

Why the delay? Reid may be worried about sending another bill to the White House to be vetoed. The president claims a federal shield law would endanger national security. Nonsense. The absence of a shield law is endangering the freedom of news organizations and whistleblowers to do their work. At its best, that work reveals wrongdoing in government -- the kind of wrongdoing that sometimes itself may endanger national security.

James Risen is the New York Times reporter who, in December 2005, broke the story about the Bush administration's illegal domestic-spying program through the National Security Agency. A livid President Bush accused The Times of harming national security. But Risen wasn't the one doing harm in this case. The danger -- to the Constitution and to individual privacy posed by authoritarian presumptions -- came from the president's domestic-spying program.

Risen happens to be one of the few Times reporters whose reporting before the Iraq war cast doubt on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, Iraq's connection with al-Qaida and the CIA's refusal to share complete intelligence reports on Iraq with Congress. And in a book published in 2006, Risen reported that CIA errors led to the capture of CIA agents in Iran, while American failures in Afghanistan helped turn that country into a "narco-state" that supplies most of the world's heroin. He's not beloved in government.

In late January, a federal grand jury issued a subpoena to Risen in an attempt to force him to reveal some of his confidential sources in his two-year-old book. The subpoena is rank intimidation -- and another reason for the shield law.

If the Senate passes the measure with the same bipartisan conviction as the House did, a Bush veto would be meaningless. The vote would constitute an override -- and a needed, unambiguous endorsement of a forceful press.

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