Journalist Shield Laws and Bloggers

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Should so-​​called “shield laws,” intended to pro­vide pro­tec­tion for jour­nal­ists from being forced to reveal their con­fi­den­tial sources, apply to blog­gers? The cur­rent answer seems to be “no,” although the ques­tion must be asked on a jurisdiction-​​by-​​jurisdiction basis.

In the United States, there is no fed­eral shield law, for jour­nal­ists or blog­gers. There are, how­ever, many shield laws at the state level. (For more on this, see A Guide to Journalist Shield Laws from Poynter Online, an excel­lent com­pendium of such laws.) Some states have already rec­og­nized the impor­tant of blog­ging to mod­ern jour­nal­ism: New York is cur­rently debat­ing whether to pass a bill to explic­itly extend pro­tec­tion to bloggers.

In Australia, such laws are cur­rently being debated for adop­tion at the fed­eral level, accord­ing to Peter Timmons, a con­sul­tant work­ing on free­dom of infor­ma­tion and pri­vacy pro­tec­tion issues. It’s unclear to me whether the pro­posed Australian law would cover blog­gers, however.

Cearta​.ie, an Irish legal blog, has sev­eral good arti­cles dis­cussing “jour­nal­ists’ source priv­i­lege” from an inter­na­tional per­spec­tive. I rec­om­mend you read through it to get a bet­ter idea of the global sta­tus of the issues, espe­cially in Europe.

From a “free press” per­spec­tive, the priv­i­lege is incred­i­bly valu­able. On other hand, like any evi­den­tiary priv­i­lege rule (spousal tes­ti­mony, for exam­ple) it can be very frus­trat­ing for law enforce­ment in cer­tain sit­u­a­tions. Overall, I think it would be a net good, if writ­ten sen­si­bly, and it would also be a net good to extend the priv­i­lege to blog­gers who act like jour­nal­ists — but again, with some spe­cific lan­guage defin­ing what that means.