#5 Reporter's Privilege

 Reporter's Privilege

The idea underlying the concept of reporter's privilege is that journalists are being granted a limited First Amendment right to not be forced to reveal information or confidential news sources in court. Before doing some research on this topic I did not really know what exactly a reporter's privilege is, and now that I know more about it I feel like it is a topic that should be addressed on a wider scale. 

The author Vanessa Leggett spent 168 days in a federal jail in Houston because she refused to disclose confidential information to a grand jury. This is longer than any American journalist had ever been held for refusing to respond to a subpoena, and was only released when the term of the grand jury before whom she was supposed to testify expired. Leggett said she would be more than willing to go back to jail again if she were subpoenaed again. She states "If that's what it takes, that's what it takes. This is not so much about me. It's about the public's right to a free and independent press." Legget went to jail due to the fact that the federal judge overseeing the grand jury found that there was no reporter's privilege in the Fifth Circuit, the federal circuit that includes Texas. 

The jailing of Legget underscores a problem that journalists have been facing for many years. Either you give up your sources or you go to jail. Most states in the United States have some sort of reporter's privilege that allows journalists to keep their sources confidential. In every jurisdiction, the guidelines are different based on a statute enacted by the legislature, and in others, the courts have found the privilege based on a constitutional right.  The situation of reporter's privilege becomes unsure when it keeps on being different in each case. Reporter's privilege is a universally accepted idea but the concept of the regulation is not specified and concrete and a problem with this is that many lawyers and journalists do not know how to handle the situation of being subpoenaed because they simply don't know what reporter's privilege is. 

The next problem related to reporter's privilege is who would actually be qualified as a reporter or not. In Leggett's case, the U.S. Department of Justice could not get involved because of the fact that Legget was considered an unpublished author, not a journalist or reporter. 

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press decided to create the "Reporter's Privilege Compendium. They discuss how priest-penitent, doctor-patient, and client-lawyer confidentiality is very well respected and so should it be for the journalists and the people they interview as well. There should not be any difference in how confidentiality is handled in these cases since they from many perspectives are the same. 

While doing research on this topic I really feel like the Reporter's Privilege should be addressed on a wider scale. I believe that this should be put in legislature everywhere and that more people should be told about this, since it still seems to be a bit unclear for some people what Reporter's Privilege actually is.