US: 12 states still don't have press shield laws - do journalists need more protection?

Posted by Liz Webber on August 3, 2009 at 5:12 PM

In today's Guardian, Texas-based journalist Alex Hannaford recounts his interview with a death-row inmate in 2003 - and the subsequent subpoena he received from the state's attorney general prior to an appeal to the inmate's sentence this year. At the time, Texas did not have a shield law, and thus Hannaford would have been obliged to hand over any notes and recordings he made during the original interview.

According to Hannaford, his experience is not an isolated incident, as the number of subpoenas issued by states - with or without a shield law - appears to have risen in the past 10 years. "It's a lack of respect for what the media does and how they do it that keeps the numbers high," Gregg Leslie, the legal defense director of the Reporters' Committee for the Freedom of the Press, told Hannaford.

In Hannaford's case, he had no idea where his tapes and notebooks were, so the attorney general let him off the hook. Still, the fact that legally he could be "commanded" to turn over such materials really struck a nerve. Hannaford asserts that such actions inhibit a journalist's ability to get a source to trust him/her, or even obtain an interview in the first place.

Following Texas's recent enactment of a shield law, there are currently 12 states that do not offer legal protection for journalists against naming sources or revealing information on those sources. Theoretically, such laws should not even be needed because current Justice Department guidelines state that subpoenas can be issued only in the most extreme circumstances, but that obviously is not the case. The Obama administration has suggested it would be open to a federal shield law, although no bill has yet been introduced.

Hannaford names a few well-known cases of reporters being jailed for refusing to divulge sources, including Judith Miller and Josh Wolf, a video blogger who holds the record for the longest incarceration time for a US journalist keeping mum on sources. More recently, a New Jersey judge ruled a blogger was not protected by that state's shield law, although in that case the circumstances ruled the blogger was not acting as a journalist when she posted disparaging comments about a company on a message board.

The right for journalists to protect their sources is often fundamental to doing their jobs. In more dire cases, as in Northern Ireland's Suzanne Breen and her reporting on Real IRA, it can be a matter of life and death. Journalists are by definition a neutral body and should not be asked to provide information that could influence any sort of court decision or other legal proceeding. If American reporters are still being asked with such frequency to give over materials at the whim of the Justice Department, then perhaps a broader protection is needed.

Source: The Guardian