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by jetti 4717 days ago
The following really struck me:

"In a 118-page set of opinions, two members of a three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va. — the court whose decisions cover the Pentagon and the C.I.A. — ruled that the First Amendment provides no protection to reporters who receive unauthorized leaks from being forced to testify against the people suspected of leaking to them."

Especially seeing as there is no such thing a leak that isn't unauthorized. It seems another step in hiding information from the public because would-be leakers now need to worry that the reporter they give information to would be forced to reveal their source.
2 comments
mmanfrin 4717 days ago
Playing devils-advocate here, but this isn't really new -- the fourth estate flourished because of journalists who vowed to go to prison rather than reveal sources, and it became a game of chicken that Journalists won in that era. Now it's the Government that has decided not to blink and the weakened resolve of news organizations has made it easy for them to trample over hard-won gains of decades past.

There, to my knowledge, have never been codified protections for journalists -- just standards.

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jetti 4716 days ago
"There, to my knowledge, have never been codified protections for journalists -- just standards."

I didn't believe this so I decided to take to Google...turns out there doesn't appear to be any formal laws. There is section 8 of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (http://www.iachr.org/declaration.htm) but that means nothing.

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FellowTraveler 4717 days ago
Many leaks are authorized. The White House leaks all the time.
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voidlogic 4717 days ago
If it is authorized its not a leak. That is not to say the White House doesn't position releases of information as leaks to journalists, but even so, those releases are not actually leaks despite what they would have you believe.
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jessaustin 4716 days ago
How can a consumer of news media tell the difference? Should we just assume they're all authorized unless someone is holed up in the Moscow airport?
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