First Amendment Chicken Little - E.J. Dionne gets hysterical (Plame)

[TacticalPeek]

First Amendment Chicken Little
E.J. Dionne gets hysterical.

By Jack Shafer

Posted Friday, Dec. 17, 2004, at 7:05 PM PT

From where I type in downtown D.C., the First Amendment seems pretty safe. But just blocks away, Washington Post op-ed columnist E.J. Dionne senses such a chill on our press freedoms that he's taken to composing his pieces in a parka, mittens, and Uggs.

...

As press scholar Stephen Bates noted earlier this month in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, the government has demanded that reporters surrender the identities of their confidential sources for at least 150 years, and reporters have been defying them for just as long—often going to jail in protest. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press documents dozens of cases in the last 30 years in which the courts have jailed or fined reporters for resisting subpoenas aimed at their sources or information.

Drawing on Reporters Committee statistics, Bates found that none of the 18 reporters jailed between 1984 and 2000 spent more than three weeks in jail and nine were released within a day. The longest time served by a journalist for contempt of a grand jury appears to be five and a half months, he writes. No reporter wants to go to jail, but in the long run I'd wager that such acts of civil disobedience are more effective in protecting press freedom than all the bleating columns by Dionne and his ilk.

...

In 1969, Branzburg was a young reporter writing investigative pieces about the illicit drug trade for his newspaper, the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky. Branzburg's then-editor, Paul Janensch wrote a wry piece about the case's trajectory last summer for the Hartford Courant. In it, he explains how Branzburg refused to surrender the names of users and dealers he had interviewed when commanded to do so by a grand jury. The case took three years to work its way through the judicial system, by which time Branzburg had departed the state for a new job. After the Supreme Court handed down its ruling, the Louisville prosecutor didn't even bother to track him down.

"The reporter never squealed, but he never went to jail, either," Janensch writes.


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http://slate.msn.com/id/2111206

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Never assume that they won't come for you next!!!

First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out.
And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me."
Martin Niemoller

[Demeter]

2. Hope Someone Comes for this Shafer Idiot Soon!