Beating Shields into Indictments 1
Llewellyn King has qualms about the proposal for a “shield law” to enable reporters to protect their sources.
No, he’s not concerned that such a shield law would protect the guilty, but, rather, that it would jeopardize the innocent. A snippet (emphasis added):
Once there is a law, common decency, societal values and tradition are abandoned. Clever prosecutors see laws not as barriers but opportunities. One fears that the law rather than supporting the broad protections of the First Amendment could, in fact, detract from them.
The basic tenet of the proposed law is to require judicial review before the mastiffs of government begin their sniffing. Their (sic. from context, the mastiffs of government–ed.) goal is always to root out the source of the reporter’s information and to punish, and possibly destroy, that person.
I don’t know whether I agree with him, but my years of observing political news leads me to agree wholeheartedly with the last sentence–the one in bold.
When the government expresses “national security concerns” as regards news, it’s frequently newspeak for “personal and political embarrassment concerns.”
June 4, 2013 at 9:07 am
[…] The suit is likely a non-starter, as Petraeus was CIA director and national security and all that. […]