From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. For the first time, and let's see, 35 years, there is real movement towards a federal shield law that would allow reporters to protect their anonymous sources. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly will bring a bill that

passed in committee last summer to the floor as early as Tuesday. And recently, the Senate Judiciary

Committee passed a similar bill. Journalists already have a legal right to protect their sources

in most states, but as Adam Liptack of the New York Times explains, if Congress does craft a true

national shield law, reporters will finally have won the privilege to protect sources in federal

cases, as some other professionals do.

Those privileges, priests, lawyers, doctors, psychotherapists are quite well established and

fairly strict. Although they do have

exceptions often in the case of lawyers, it has an exception for crimes and frauds. And if you were

to apply some of those exceptions to journalists, you might have real problems because very often

the people who speak to us and whom we want to protect are violating a law by providing information

to us.

But certainly journalists aren't calling for a blanket exemption from all legal proceedings

always forever.

Not anymore.

The press used to take a quite absolutist stand.

In 1972, when the Supreme Court heard its only case on this subject, many news organizations said that only absolute protection will do. That's not the way we talk anymore.

The 1972 case you referred to as Brandsburg v. Hayes, it found that reporters have no First Amendment right to protect their sources.

Now, recently you run across some notes written by Justice Lewis Powell at the time.

He's known for having written an ambiguous concurring opinion that is often used to argue that reporters may because it's so vague, do in fact have a constitutional right to protect their sources.

These notes that just surfaced actually really clarify what Justice Powell meant to say.

On the one hand,

...