I post this as I see a number of liberal bloggers wring their hands over the precedent being set by New York Times reporter Judith Miller being hauled to jail for civil contempt in the Valerie Plame leak investigation.
These hand-wringers decry the lack of a federal shield law for journalists and generally want a maximalist version of such a law.
I respond:
1. An absolutist, or near-absolutist, shield law, especially at the federal level, is an invitation to game the systtem. That's why quasi-absolutists like Armando on Kos, and quasi-quasi-absolutists like Drum at Political Animal and Marshall at TPM are simply wrong.
Shield laws of the degree they want are simply an open invitation for suck-up journalists like Miller to play Fourth Estate in the sense of an unelected co-equal branch of The Establishment rather than a Fourth Estate for "afflicting the comforted."
And THAT, IMO, would be the fallout from a quasi-absolute shield law, thereby entrenching the MSM/Establishmentarian nature of current Beltway media types.
In other words, an absolutist or quasi-absolutist shield law would have the possibility of lessening the media's integrity, not boosting it.
2. No confidentiality privilege is even quasi-absolute. Ministers, counselors and lawyers are generally required by law to reveal confessional information when child sexual abuse information has been confessed.
Given that the client-patient professional counselor agreement is much more elevated than journalist-source confidentiality, your claims for its quasi-absolute status simply don't hold water.
Update:
Read this Kos diary for more insight and speculation as to whether or not Miller might be the modern, self-appointed, equivalent of a 1960s CIA operative acting under cover of being a journalist.
No comments:
Post a Comment