(Josh Wolf is a freelance journalist and anarchist. He has been jailed for refusing to turn over videotapes of a protest being investigated by a federal grand jury. Online Journalism Review has written about his case; here is a bit more from Wikipedia; and from his own site. On Friday, December 1, 2006, I ran a reminder of his incarceration. I will write about his case every Friday until he is freed. What will you do? Tom Abate, San Leandro, California; aka MiniMediaGuy).
“I can’t think of a time when investigative reporting has faced more pressures than right now,” Poynter Institute commentator Al Thompkins wrote in a recent posting that pointed to some of the investigative pieces that mass media outlets published or broadcast in 2006. In a subsequent column Poynter’s Leann Frola interviewed half-a-dozen investigative reporters. Her summary noted that “most of these journalists are in favor of a national shield law.”
I’m glad it wasn’t unanimous because I also dissent from the notion that Congress should pass a national shield law — in part because it wouldn’t have helped Josh Wolf. This young man has been jailed for more than four months on a flimsy pretext (or so I’ve argued). Yet he would likely fall outside the protection of shield law on two grounds: first that his freelance status and anarchist sympathies preclude him from being defined as a journalist; and because a federal prosecutor and a federal judge have ruled that his evidence is needed and cannot be obtained any other way – an exception that was embodied in a recently-proposed shield law.