Scott Swanson
I once taught journalism at a university. Among the subjects I taught were media law and media ethics.
I’ve always been very interested in laws that govern the media, not just because I happen to run a newspaper. I just find it fascinating to watch how governments sometimes attempt to control the media and how the rights of the public are, through various legislative and court actions, broadened or restricted. Generally, when the public’s rights are restricted in terms of freedoms of expression or access to information, so are the media’s.
I’m not saying that’s all bad, but it’s not good either.
I understand why we members of the public – and the media – no longer can go down to the DMV and ask them to run a license plate for us or the name of someone we’re looking for. That ended in many states after a young actress in Los Angeles was tracked down by a stalker and killed – through California DMV records.
I also understand how HIPPA, the Health Insurance Privacy and Portability Act, came about. That’s the one that forces you to stand behind the line at the pharmacy counter so you can’t, perchance, overhear the state of someone else’s health. It also prevents snoopy people, such as employers, from finding out what your medical problems are so they can take appropriate (to them) action.
Unfortunately, it’s also a law that makes it very difficult for those of us who are trying to gather information for news stories to find out how someone in the hospital is doing. Basically, other than some extremely generalized statements, we can’t find out how an accident victim is doing any more. Medics won’t even tell us if they’ve taken someone to the hospital.
Recently, another area of the law has swung back into the spotlight – press privilege or shield laws (or the lack thereof). The latest case to bring this issue to light is that of the two San Francisco Chronicle reporters, Mark Finaru-Wada and Lance Williams, who wrote the book “Game of Shadows,” detailing alleged steroid use by San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds. Now the two have been ordered by a federal judge to testify before a grand jury regarding who leaked secret testimony by Bonds and other elite athletes to them.
Finaru-Wada and Williams, by the way, weren’t doing anything illegal in listening to whoever told them the gory details of the 2003 grand jury proceedings in which Bonds and the others testified. There is no law that prohibits them from publishing what they’ve learned. The only illegality was on the part of whoever it was that talked to the reporters.
You can probably see the problem here. Someone decides the public should know what happened in those secret (by law) hearings. He or she tells the reporters. The reporters, who have been working on this Bond-steroids story for a long time, listen and learn. They publish some of what they’ve learned. Fallout happens. The government tries to figure out who told. It can’t. So it complains to a judge that it has no option but to subpoena the reporters and force them to talk by threatening them with jail time if they don’t.
Now, if you are Finaru-Wada and Williams, what do you do? If you talk, do you think any source, ever, will tell them anything that remotely resembles secret or sensitive information – which is how a lot of important news stories begin? So they’ve stated they won’t talk, even if it means dire consequences.
If they don’t testify, a judge could send them to jail for up to 18 months – far longer, as some news acocunts have noted, than any of the folks caught up in this BALCO steroids investigation have thus far served.
They aren’t the first to face this problem. Last year, New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed for 85 days for refusing to testify in an investigation into the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name.
Forcing reporters to testify about how they gained information is a waste of time and money and it’s bad not only for the reporter, but for the public. Let’s face it: Despite occasional missteps by members of the press, who have feet of clay like everyone else and despite the fact that too many folks simply do not care any more about what happens in the public arena, members of the press can and do play an important role in our democratic republic. They uncover malfeasance in the halls of power and, though we don’t necessarily like hearing about it, at least they make us aware of problems that we can then take steps to deal with.
Let’s bring this home. What if a public official here in Linn County, or even in Sweet Home, were up to no good and we, here at The New Era, were tipped off by someone in the know.
If we were asked, officially or unofficially, to divulge who it was that tipped us off, if we had agreed to keep their identity secret we would – even if it meant paying a penalty such as these reporters are facing. Our job is to keep our readers aware of how their community is operating and we cannot do anything to inhibit our ability to do so.
Jailing reporters for doing what they’re supposed to do, on behalf of the public, is bad business and if the grand jury making the inquiry into these leaks has sense, it will vent its wrath elsewhere.