A broad 'shield' for journalists

[Commentary] As the Senate works to craft a shield law, one crucial issue is determining who is a journalist. In other words, whose promises of confidentiality deserve protection? For me, it's always instructive to go back to the founders when addressing questions like these. Who did they have in mind when they drafted a 1st Amendment that wisely gave broad protection to "freedom of the press"? The answer surely includes pamphleteers such as Thomas Paine.

Throughout the revolutionary era, countless citizen-journalists like Paine, operating on street corners in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, informed the public, exposed and challenged corruption, and indeed inspired the American Revolution. That experience must inform whom we consider deserving of the shield. Today's critics miss the mark when they argue that unless we sharply limit who counts as a "covered person" under a shield law, then irresponsible bloggers, freelancers and others will claim protection they don't deserve. Though not all bloggers are potential candidates for a Pulitzer Prize -- indeed, some are terribly irresponsible -- as a group they are today's street-corner pamphleteers, protecting our freedom and strengthening our democracy. Their predecessors in the founding generation surely would have understood the dangers in allowing Congress, or the executive, to deny the law's protection to whole categories of journalists based simply on their employment status or the medium in which they work. We in government must not permit our aversion to criticism, or our hostility to a particular message, to dictate who's in and who's out.