Federal Shield Law Shielded By Media

Newspaper editorial pages uniformly support the new federal shield law, protecting journalists’ from divulging their sources. (A Google check fails to find any opposed.) The Center for Responsive Politics describes newspapers’ coordinated lobbying. Their combined circulation is in the tens of millions. The Washington Post spent $91,000 lobbying in 2007, including for the shield law. Contrary views in the far smaller and less influential alternate media, or occasional op-ed’s, have relatively puny weight.

Relatively few congressmen or senators want to tangle with their local or with national newspapers.

The National Association of Manufacturers, although not the powerhouse lobbyer of bygone industrial America days, still represents over 100,000 manufacturers in all 50-states, and has been more defensive of individual’s rights to privacy. Victor Schwartz, respected attorney and law professor, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee on NAM’s behalf last June. He pointed out many specific instances in which individual privacy rights, recognized elsewhere in law, courts and custom would be open to violation by the media as a result of the shield law. The NAM recognizes that improvements to the draft legislation resulted: “Fortunately, the sponsors of the legislation have been sensitive to these concerns, and many improvements have been made.” However, the rights of business to protect proprietary information have not been given similar respect.

Business is still interested in more, clearly defined protections for private-sector interests, and we're still working on the bill.

But the funny thing is, you wouldn't know any of this business aspect to the bill from reading today's Washington Post, its lead editorial and two op-eds, would you? The issue is ONLY about the media; a major, private-sector issue loses out to media self-interest.

Which causes us to muse: How many times does that happen, that the media tell a story about a piece of legislation with heat and passion, but only part of the story? Leaving the reader essentially uninformed?

And then a bill passes, with all its glorious unintended consequences....

Of course, there’s much more to the legislation that isn’t being given a fair shake in the media. I’ve written extensively about the federal shield law. Here I discuss and document previous efforts to protect national security secrets vis a vis the media. Here I discuss the self-serving and contradictory hypocrisy within media as to sources when it’s meme is challenged. Here I address the issue of the public’s interest in national security, needing to be protected from the media.

Others, with practical experience, have challenged the shield law’s overreach. Another expert on the shield law has focused on national security weakening aspects, updated here.

Yet, if one reads today’s commentary in the Washington Post on the Senate Judiciary Committee voting overwhelmingly in favor of the Free Flow of Information Act (i.e., federal shield law), you might think the most important issue is who is a journalist. The muddle there is enough to make the Act an act of open-season by almost anyone on national security.

It demonstrates the problems that arise when government has to start classifying people, and the danger of having the feds determine who qualifies as a journalist.

The entire exercise seems a strange effort for government, which has a legitimate interest in securing information, although perhaps never to the extent they classify material. Those who see wrongdoing have other mechanisms with which to get attention to the malfeasance, including directly contacting Congress with the information rather than the New York Times or Robert Novak. This shield law makes it easier for people to abuse both national security and the free press for their own political motivations.

Journalists might be given more credence for self-claimed privileges if they demonstrated more care for the public’s true rights.