Journalists under siege.

• Author: Saltzman, Joe
• Position: Words Images

IT IS NOT MUCH FUN being a journalist anymore. Special interest groups have spent decades trying to convince the public that the media are not to be trusted. Government and Big Business leaders have echoed the same refrain. Top news media themselves have created a series of highly publicized scandals, including the fabrication of stories in The New York Times and at CBS News, as well as the falsifying of circulation numbers at Newsday. Warring factions around the world seem more eager than ever to kill the journalists covering conflicts rather than to talk to them. Now the courts are threatening more than a handful of journalists with sanctions, home detention, or prison terms for not naming sources in investigative news stories.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press, believes that punishing journalists for acting as watchdogs on those who wield power is dangerous. "If journalists are not able to protect their sources, the public will ultimately suffer because fewer people will be willing to come forward with information about public affairs out of tear of retaliation," she says.

One TV journalist, Jim Taricani, a veteran reporter at WJAR-TV in Rhode Island, refused to name the tipster who gave him an FBI videotape showing the mayor of Providence receiving a bribe. A Federal judge sentenced him to a six-month sentence of house arrest when he would not identify his confidential source. Moreover, the judge was not satisfied with just house arrest. Taricani's confinement for criminal contempt includes several punitive conditions: no Internet access, interviews, or reporting.

There are nearly a dozen different journalists across the country facing subpoenas from prosecutors who want to see their work product. It is not just U.S. courts, either. Now the military is getting in on the action. A Denver Post reporter resisted a military court subpoena for notes about an alleged gang rape of an 18-year-old woman at an Air Force base. The reporter was protecting the woman who was raped and attorneys for the newspaper called the request "a blatant fishing expedition" by the defense. As Society of Professional Journalists President Irwin Gratz puts it, "It's really beginning to look like open season on reporters."

Only the journalists seem to care about this infringement on First Amendment rights. The public, buried under an avalanche of special interest groups' condemnation of the news media, bombarded...