Legal News

Shield Law for Reporters: A Good or Bad Thing?

By Dan Slater

We’ve been writing a heckuvalot lately about Toni Locy, the former USA Today reporter who was on the receiving end of a financially-ruinous contempt order for refusing to reveal her government sources on stories written about Dr. Steven Hatfill’s possible role in the 2001 anthrax attacks. There’s been no news in the case. But that’s OK, because in the meantime we’ve got an out-of-court spat between Hatfill’s lawyer and a prominent free press advocate. And it’s unfolding — where else? — in the WSJ editorial pages.

On March 11, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit stayed district court judge Reggie Walton’s contempt order, ruling that Locy didn’t have to pay the fines established in the contempt order until her lawyers had a chance to fight it.

A few days later, Mark Grannis, Hatfill’s lawyer, wrote a WSJ editorial bashing “media apologists” for turning “Locy’s disobedience into a new excuse for a ‘reporter’s shield’ law — a law that would let reporters hide the names of their sources when courts need them, instead of testifying fully and truthfully like the rest of us.” Specifically, Grannis takes a swipe at the AP for publishing a “sound bite” from Lucy Dalglish, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Among other things, Dalglish told the AP that Judge Walton was “arrogant” for trying “to destroy [Locy’s] life” by bankrupting her.

Today, the WSJ ran a letter from Dalglish, responding to Grannis. She writes that Grannis, in his op-ed, fails to recognize that the shield law — “as currently drafted in both houses of Congress” — would allow litigants to get a confidential source’s identity if they have satisfied the exhaustion requirements and a public-interest balancing test.

We turn it over to you, LB’ers: What do you think of a federal shield law for reporters, providing it comes with the exceptions Dalglish points out?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 26, 2008 (boomark / email).