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Why journalists need shield laws

By
ABDON M. PALLASCH,
Reprinted from The Chicago Sun Times

Published Monday, September 28, 2009, 4:14 PM
Updated Friday, October 16, 2009, 12:21 PM

 

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Matt Dillon and Alan Alda in "Nothing but the Truth"
Matt Dillon and Alan Alda in "Nothing but the Truth"

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald could take it when he was demonized as a heartless Southern prosecutor in the movie that fictionalizes his real-life jailing of New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

What he objected to — he quipped last Saturday during our “debate” over a proposed reporters’ shield law at the American Bar Association convention — was the prissy name they gave his character, played by Matt Dillon.

“I haven’t seen ‘Nothing but the Truth,’” Fitzgerald said, “but I have to tell you: I grew up in Brooklyn. And when the . . . character . . . based upon [you] is named Patton DuBois, that really hurts. I left a message for [Miller’s defense lawyer] Floyd Abrams. I said, ‘I don’t mind you being in the movie and playing the judge and changing the facts to make it a lot more one-sided. But having to be called Patton DuBois, that really hurt.’”

Miller spent months in jail for refusing to reveal the name of a source to Fitzgerald.

And because the sentence imposed on the defendant in the case — Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby — was commuted by President Bush, Miller ironically was the only person jailed in the case.

“That’s not my fault,” said the judge in the case, Reggie Walton, who also sat on Saturday’s panel with Fitzgerald and me. Walton sentenced Libby to 2 1/2 years in prison and fined him $250,000 for lying to federal officials about leaking CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity to the press after her husband criticized the Bush administration.

Criminal cases in which prosecutors order reporters to reveal sources during “crises” of “national security” get most of the press, but Fitzgerald has never hauled a reporter into court here in Chicago.

Journalists here need a shield law because lawyers in civil suits — particularly those working for the City of Chicago — are hauling in reporters to make them give up their notes when they write about, for instance, men who had false confessions beaten out of them by the police.

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