Danger: Feds Fish in Journalists’ Files

We all should be deeply alarmed that federal agents recently fished in the emails and telephone records of an American-based international news organization. 

Not that the government didn’t have a good reason to look.  The Associated Press had published an article, based in part on information provided by an unnamed government source, that inadvertently revealed the identity of an American spy in Yemen.  

The feds called it a breach of national security and demanded to know the reporter’s source, but the AP refused on grounds that revealing the source would betray a trust.  So, the feds secretly searched through a number of the AP’s emails and telephone records to find it.  

The feds are absolutely right in wanting to know who leaked the information, but they are dead wrong in searching the AP’s files to get it. 

The danger is that if sources feel they cannot trust the news organizations to keep them anonymous -- if, for example, they think the feds might search the news organizations’ emails and phone records -- the sources will dry up, and our news media will become mere conduits through which government-written press releases would flow.  We the public would know only what the government wants to know, only what it spoon-feeds us. 

If that had been the case in recent times, we never would have known of such things as our government’s warrantless wiretappings, or its secret prisons, or that it tortured its prisoners.  All of those stories depended on confidential sources.

Yes, there will be some abuses, and that is sad.  But I’d rather face the news media’s abuses than the government’s.  

-Skip