Who Gets Covered By the Shield Bill If It Becomes Law?

The Shield Bill, more formally called the Free Flow of Information Act, looks like it could pass during the lame duck session later this year. Of course, in the wake of Wikileaks, the legislation is…complicated. So the debate shifts from “if” into “who” to protect.

Clint Hendler at CJR:

The definition of a journalist has been one of the drafting process’s stickiest questions, with many journalists favoring a function-based definition, one that judges a person seeking the shield’s protections by what they do (whether or not they act as a journalist) rather than a status-based definition, which would include some test of who the journalist is-simply put, whether or not they are a professional, however defined. Paul Boyle, the Newspaper Association of America’s chief lobbyist, says that further changes are likely to this portion of the bill, requiring that the claimant show that they regularly did journalism before they appeared in court seeking to foil a subpoena with the shield.

All we know is if this bill would have been drafted five years ago – it’d be completely obsolete right now.

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