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Texas needs a shield law to protect its citizens

Eagle Editorial Board

It is called the Texas Free Flow of Information Act, or by many, the Texas Shield Law. In reality, though, companion bills before the Texas House and Senate should be called the Public's Right to Know Law, for that is what the proposed legislation protects.

The bills before the Legislature protect journalists from having to reveal their sources unless ordered by a judge under limited circumstances. Without such protection, too many prosecutors or lawyers in civil trials would try -- as they do now -- to get the media to do their job for them.

This has a chilling effect on sources with important information the public needs to know, but who wish, for various legitimate reasons, to remain anonymous.

Say a person has information that a city council awards contracts for a public project to a company that is providing secret payments -- bribes -- to council members. Or, perhaps, a person has information that a school superintendent is taking money that should be used for classroom instruction or athletic competition. Maybe an employee of a nonprofit agency learns that the executive director is taking money meant for charitable purposes. We're not saying any of this is happening here, but if it does, the public needs to know about it.

Many times, people with that kind of information are afraid they will be retaliated against for coming forward. They fear for their jobs and, in some cases, their safety and the safety of their families. Sometimes, governments or desperate individuals will go to great lengths to keep such damaging information from becoming public.

Brave people turn to the news media to get their information out. Journalists sometimes offer their sources anonymity, but do everything they can to verify the information before printing or broadcasting it.

Too often, prosecutors and other lawyers try to force the journalists to reveal their sources. It is far easier for them to do so than to do the work required to gather the same information -- and they know that by bullying reporters, they can sometimes keep embarrassing information from ever getting out to the public. Journalists are threatened with jail, and as we have seen far too often in recent years, some of them actually are jailed for weeks or months until they finally reveal their sources.

That danger -- to both the journalists and their sources -- too often keeps important news from coming out. That's where the Free Flow of Information Law comes in.

The law offers qualified privilege for journalists, an approach favored by the majority of the 36 states and the District of Columbia that have enacted shield laws.

The bills before the Texas House and Senate would require judges to decide whether reporters must reveal their sources -- and it gives judges a framework to use in reaching their decision, something they have been asking for almost two decades. Those trying to force journalists to reveal their sources would have to prove that they cannot get the same information any other way. Why should prosecutors, with their ability to subpoena people and records, have difficulty doing their own work?

More importantly, the laws clearly define who would be covered: journalists employed by legitimate news organizations such as newspapers and TV news departments. Online bloggers and authors not employed by a recognized media news outlet would not be protected by the Free Flow of Information Law.

The House version of the bill, HB 670, is before the House Judiciary and Civil Jurisprudence Committee, which heard testimony on the bill last week. This week, it is to vote on whether to send the measure to the full House.

We hope it does.

The Senate version -- identical to the one in the House -- still is pending.

Without the use of anonymous sources of wrongdoing, the media could not have exposed Watergate or Enron or Abu Ghraib or Whitewater. Abuses in the Texas Youth Commission would have gone unreported and, thus, uncorrected.

The public never likes to learn of such abuses, but we all have a critical need to know when those we trust to protect us instead are doing things that harm us.

The Free Flow of Infor-mation Law -- really the Public's Right to Know Law -- has been rejected by the Legislature twice before. This year, it stands a good chance of becoming law.

Let your state representative and state senator know that you want the bills to pass, that they are important to you and to all the people of Texas.