A shield law, please

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The stars have aligned for a federal shield law for journalists. It's hardly a matter of controversy except in the darker corners of the Bush administration.The House approved a shield bill last fall, 398 to 21. The Senate Judiciary Committee reported out its own shield bill, 15 to 2. All the major party candidates support it, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and, most recently, John McCain, though not without reservations.McCain acknowledged that, improperly used, it could be a license to do harm, "but it's also a license to do good; to disclose injustice and unlawfulness and inequities; and to encourage their swift correction."The Senate is making some last-minute changes to its bill, making it somewhat weaker than the House version, but the important thing is to get it past the full Senate and let House and Senate conferees worry about squaring the differences.Basically, the shield bill says that reporters may not be forced to disclose their sources except under very limited and compelling circumstances. The bill is not much different from the Justice Department's longstanding guidelines for subpoenaing reporters that seem to have fallen into disuse during the Bush administration.At the last minute, Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff came forth to say, without going into any particular detail, that a shield law would jeopardize national security. The Bush administration has gone to that well too often to be credible.The administration believes that its own right to secrecy, not only from the public but from the judicial and legislative branches as well, is absolute. Mukasey called the law "unnecessary and unwise."As we write, a federal judge is threatening former USA Today reporter Toni Locy with financial ruin -- fines of up to $5,000 a day that she must pay personally -- unless she divulges her government sources in stories she wrote five years ago, for which she no longer has her notes and for which her testimony may not be needed in any case.Journalists covering government work as the eyes and the ears of the public, and in the best examples look after the public's right to know. They are not there to do unwitting legal legwork. Pass the law. Please.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)