I hate being prescient

Senate committee passes bill to define "journalist"
Forty years ago, as a young college journalist, I attended the national convention of Sigma Delta Chi as a student delegate. SDX, as it was called at the time, was what is now known as the Society of Professional Journalists.

At that meeting, during a session on the Watergate scandal involving the Nixon Administration, I got to ask a question of Benjamin Bradley, then the executive editor of the Washington Post and the response I got was “I was hoping no one would ask that question.”

My question? It was simple and straight forward. Mr. Bradley was on a panel and I directed my question to him:

“Sir, in light of all the investigative reporting the Post has done on the Watergate affair, what is your view of shield laws to protect journalists?”

There was this long pause, and then Mr. Bradley said, “I was hoping no one would ask that question.”

What followed was a lively discussion between the seven panelists (including one from the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s office (OSP)  who was in charge of negotiating with the media over getting information they had uncovered in their investigations). At one point, Mr. Bradley revealed that the Post that day had been served with a subpoena from the OSP, at which the poor fellow from the OSP about twisted his head off to look at the Post editor. You see, he was the first step in issuing those subpoenas and legal writs and he knew nothing about this one.

Now, I think Mr. Bradley and I shared a problem with Shield Laws. You see, the protections of the First Amendment apply to all American citizens, not just to people who work for newspapers, magazines or TV and radio stations (add in Cable Networks now).

So, if you are trying to protect freedom of the press by shielding reporters, etc., from having to divulge sources of information that ordinary citizens can be forced to divulge by court order then you have to define who is protected and who is not protected.

That is a very difficult problem because freedom of the press, as I have repeatedly pointed out over the intervening years, belongs to everybody, whether he or she is employed by a news gathering and disseminating organization or just somebody who is passing out leaflets on the street corner (or blogging on the internet). The people who promote shield laws want to make themselves protected like priests and lawyers but in each of those cases you have to meet a minimum requirement and basically be recognized (or licensed) by the government for the protect to apply.

My contention is that when you start “licensing” journalists then you are infringing on the freedom of the press of those people who are not employed by “media”. You see, for the court to say who is included in this special class of people, then somebody has to define what is qualifying news gathering organization.

If the court (government) only recognizes (therefore allows) only certain people the privilege of protecting their sources, then two things happen.

1. The equality before the law that is supposed to be the great hallmark of our system of governance is breached big time.
2. The government gets to say who gets to play and who does not and that opens the door wide for the suppression of unpopular views or even simple dissents from the consensus viewpoint.

Note that there is no way to define a journalist without running afoul of this trap, as I have patiently explained to an number of attorneys who were advocating journalist shield laws in a couple of states. They admitted I was right but argued that it was for a greater good.

My response to that is who set up journalists as gods and what requirements do they have to meet to be so designated. I say that because in my 30-plus years as a working journalist at 12 different newspapers across the United States, I have found many a good reporter / photographer / “journalist” who had none of the degrees or certifications that would qualify them as a “professional” other than their contributions to the publication that I was working for at the time.

I quit one editor job after the publisher told me that if he ever got sued, he was going to sue me. And he wanted me to play watchdog on local government officials? Oh boy, I got out of there as fast as I could.

Now, it seems the federal government is going to define who is a journalist and who is not. I warned people that this would happen if they started enacting shield laws. It also was just the first step in controlling the media. I repeat that warning now.

This is a bad law and I hope it won’t go anywhere.