As a former journalist, and a current teacher of journalism, I’m an avid believer in the First Amendment. It’s no accident that the First Amendment was the first in the Constitution. The founders understood this basic element of democracy — that Congress (or anyone, for that matter) shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press or of speech.

I’m also a believer in Shield Laws, which are a byproduct of the First Amendment and have been enacted by at least 30 states. These laws allow journalists to avoid prosecution in cases where they refuse to reveal the identities of their confidential sources — even, sometimes, when a judge orders them to do so. Often this happens if a journalist is writing about a crime that was committed — such as corporate embezzlement or drug trafficking — in an effort to give the public a clearer view of such crimes. Sometimes the journalist will not name the sources or use pseudonyms when describing them. A judge, or a prosecutor, or both, might see such a story and demand that the journalist come forth with the names of those who have committed the crimes. But journalists, who are bound to protect their sources, almost always refuse.

Now, an ordinary citizen might think, “Hey, the journalist saw the crime, and knows who did it, so why shouldn’t he/she tell law enforcement officials what he knows?” The answer is simple — without the journalist, the public would never know about these crimes and the public would be powerless to prevent them. In other words, the journalist in these cases is performing a public service. The journalist should go — and many have gone — to jail to protect the identify of the sources that entrusted him or her.

There is an ongoing investigation that turns this basic principle — the idea of the Shield Law — on its ear. This case makes mincemeat of the argument that journalists should always protect confidential sources in all cases. This is the case of Valerie Plame.

A brief recap — Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, was a foreign service officer and ambassador who refuted President Bush’s claim that Iraq had sought nuclear weapons from “Africa.” Bush made the claim, which has since been disproven, in his 2003 State of the Union address — part of his justification for going to war with Iraq. Wilson simply said that Bush was either wrong or was lying. He proved it convincingly in a New York Times column and in his book, "The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity — A Diplomat’s Memoir."

In retaliation against this breech of the party line, someone affiliated with Bush and/or the Republicans tried to discredit Wilson by publicly identifying his wife, Plame, as a CIA operative. Naming someone publicly in this capacity is tantamount to treason, and it is a federal crime. In effect, it’s helping the terrorists identify American citizens who work for the government so they can target them and perhaps murder them. So, someone in the Bush adminstration, or the Republican Party, committed a treasonous act, and identified Plame in an effort to silence her husband for telling the truth about Bush’s misstatement of fact as he tried to justify the Iraq invasion. This was a crime. And it is still being investigated by a federal prosecutor and the FBI.

Here is where the question of ethical journalism comes into play. The journalists involved have refused to name their sources in this case, citing the First Amendment and Shield protection. They were simply doing their jobs as journalists, they say.

Yet this is precisely the problem. These journalists were used by persons with a political agenda, in an effort to retaliate against another person for political purposes. In fact, these journalists, by actually making Valerie Plame’s name public, enabled the crime of identifying her. Yet the journalists in this case claim the same protection as other journalists who are attempting a public service — i.e., informing the public about crimes that could hurt the community.

Here’s another way to think of it. In the journalistic cannon, it is unethical to reveal one’s confidential source. But isn’t it more unethical to allow oneself, as a journalist, to be used as a political tool to retaliate against an American intelligence officer and his wife — as a way to silence his right to free speech under the First Amendment? And this happened when Wilson’s offense was that he simply told the truth about what George Bush falsely claimed in his State of the Union address.

Usually journalists claim Shield privilege in the name of the First Amendment. Here they are claiming that privilege because they have allowed government and political operatives to use them in a partisan political effort to prevent the truth from being told. In other words, they’re taking the Shield privilege to silence free speech in a democray, and they’re doing it to protect those who’ve committed a crime against Joseph Wilson, against his wife, against the nation and against the nation’s fight against terrorism.

That leads one to the inescapable conclusion — the journalists who refuse to identify the political criminals who outed Valerie Plame aided an act of treason — and they should reveal who these criminals are, in the name good journalism and in the name of protecting America.

Guy Reel is an assistant professor of mass communication at Winthrop University. He can be reached at reelg@winthrop.edu.

###