Editorial: Shielding the right to know

With the dire financial challenges facing American newspapers and other news organizations, average citizens and elected officials alike have been fretting - with good reason - over the collateral damage to democracy from a weakened press.

For them, Thomas Jefferson's stirring words echo down the centuries about the easy choice between "a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government" - as well as his dictum that "our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press."

Congress has even held hearings on what, if anything, government might do to help.

While it turns out that most proposals for government aid would undermine the vitally important notion of an independent press, there is one way that Washington can help.

In fact, a U.S. Senate committee could get a start on that important work as early as today.

Finally catching up to the House, the Senate is taking another crack at passing a federal shield law that would protect reporters and their sources. A Senate Judiciary Committee session has been scheduled this morning to consider a measure cosponsored by Sen. Arlen Specter (D., Pa.) and other Senate veterans.

Specter's bill would set national standards for protecting confidential news sources, with reasonable exceptions for instances where authorities were seeking information to halt a terrorist attack or to thwart other types of serious crime.

Shield laws ultimately benefit citizens by enabling the press to keep them better informed about their government and, at times, even ferreting out wrongdoing. Without such assurances of confidentiality, whistle-blowers and other news sources would be less likely to come forward.

Most states already provide these protections for reporters. Pennsylvania's law is considered one of the strongest and only recently withstood a legal assault in a case that led the state Supreme Court to reassert that the law "was enacted to protect the free flow of information to the news media in their role as information providers to the general public."

But federal legal challenges in recent years have made end-runs around existing shield laws - ironically by lawsuits from subjects of news leaks who contended their privacy rights had been violated under federal law.

When reporters have been jailed or hit with devastating fines - like the $5,000-a-day levy against former Philadelphia Daily News reporter Toni Locy - it must chill news sources.

Given a troubled business outlook, it also stands to reason that many newspapers may be less able to mount the legal challenges needed to win freedom-of-inform cases. In that way, a federal shield law has become even more critical to maintaining the flow of information necessary to keeping American democracy alive.