The First Amendment Forum sponsored by SOU on Monday night focused on the need to protect reporters from the inquiring minds of federal prosecutors. That effort has gained some traction in recent months, with Congress tantalizingly close to passing a federal shield law.
A shield law — which three dozen states, including Oregon, already have — essentially says that reporters cannot be required to give up their sources. The need for it is obvious: Confidential sources are much less willing to talk to reporters about a sensitive subject if they know the reporters can be subpoenaed and ordered to reveal who gave them the information.
But the effort to set up a federal shield law has been complicated by the explosion of “citizen journalists” — bloggers, Tweeters, Facebook posters, etc. The shield law is now hung up in the Senate, where Sens. Durbin (Illinois) and Feinstein (Calif.) have expressed concern that it grants the title of journalist to too many people, many of whom are obviously not journalists.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, expressed some similar concerns Monday night, noting that at recent national political conventions she saw activists carrying video cameras and trying to pass themselves off as journalists while at the same time actively protesting or advocating for some cause. Those folks are clearly not journalists, but where do you draw the line between real and pretend reporters?
And who draws that line — Congress? There’s that old slippery slope appearing on the horizon. If Congress can say who is a journalist and who isn’t, where does that lead? It might not be the fox guarding the henhouse, but it could be the fox deciding who the guard will be.
We need a federal shield law. It should apply only to real journalists. The federal government, or any government, should not decide who’s a real journalist and who’s not. So what to do? Dalglish says the senators should chill and approve a bill that doesn’t try to parse the who is/who isn’t question. I guess I agree with that; it’s certainly better than giving the government defacto licensing control.
It ain’t perfect, but it may be the best we can get. Seems like a lot of that going on in Washington these days.
