Published: October 08, 2009 04:28 pm         

TRIBUNE-STAR EDITORIAL: Federal shield law needs to be passed, not weakened

No doubt President Barack Obama is privy to information that U.S. Sen. Barack Obama never imagined. As commander in chief, he is aware of dangers, domestic and foreign, that even the most informed member of Congress, not to mention the general public, can’t know.

That said, we are disturbed by a partial shift in Obama’s position on a federal shield law for professional journalists. The majority of states have such laws, which protect sensitive news sources and whistle blowers from exposure, and protect news reporters from going to jail for keeping those sources anonymous.

For many years now, several members of Congress, including Indiana’s Richard Lugar and Mike Pence, have worked patiently to bring a federal shield statute in line with those of the states. For eight years, the George W. Bush administration fought those efforts with an unprecedented zeal.

As the junior senator from Illinois, Obama co-sponsored the very sort of protective federal legislation his administration is now attempting to weaken. At issue is how much influence the White House should have on forcing a journalist to reveal his or her source in a story that concerns “classified information.” (For the Bush White House, almost everything but the First Family’s grocery lists seemed to warrant “classified” status.)

The passed House version of the shield law, and a version currently idling in the Senate Judiciary Committee, provide for judicial review of such questions. If and when the executive branch contends published information threatens national security, but a news organization insists it is about the public’s right to know, a federal judge would hear both arguments, confidentially, and decide.

Sounding eerily like its predecessor, the Obama White House now wants the Senate bill to be changed to allow its wishes — and words — to weigh more than the news media’s before the judge ever hears the two sides. If the presidential administration in charge said, “This will (or already did) jeopardize national security,” a judge would be bound to defer to that declaration without real argument or proof.

When the Bush administration was practicing this kind of unilateral stifling of information, Sen. Obama rightly disapproved. He may now deeply believe that his White House would never abuse such power — and it might not. But we don’t know that anymore than we know what future administrations might do.

There is a reason such veteran legislators as Lugar and Pence — people who do not play fast and loose with national security — have put their efforts into constructing this reasonable federal shield law. President Obama and his security advisers need to consider the history of this law and the intentions of the men and women who have crafted it and guided it through Congress. Sen. Obama was quite articulate on the subject.