Out On The Prairie Cowboys fall for each other in Ang Lee’s riveting, landmark “Brokeback Mountain.”
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Dead Men Do Tell TalesJudge sends a chill through reporters everywhere with ruling against newspaper in Pa. coroner probeby Kevin UhrichNo sooner do we finish celebrating National Sunshine Week — an effort to open up government to the citizens who pay the bills and the generous salaries of the public servants racking up those expenses — a law enforcement agency fires a potentially fatal broadside at what’s left of one of America’s most precious rights. It’s not enough that hundreds of laws have been passed over the past five years in states around the country limiting our right to information on the doings of our public officials; now it seems the government believes it is time that newspapers start opening up their files to them. Now that's a switch, and a very dangerous switch at that. We thought the First Amendment was a prohibition against government doing such things, but apparently not in Pennsylvania, ironically the very cradle of what we’ve come to call liberty. Back in a state better known to many as The Land of Taxes, our most basic right is being dismantled by a judge and the state Attorney General’s Office, which two weeks ago seized four computers from the Lancaster Intelligencer-Journal daily newspaper (www.lancasteronline.com), according to reports by the McCormick Tribune Foundation-funded Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (www.rcfp.org) and Editor & Publisher magazine (www.editorandpublisher.com). The Intelligencer’s editor has had to travel to nearby Harrisburg, the state capital, to testify before a grand jury conducting a statewide investigation into official leaks to reporters, and some of his reporters are being represented by attorneys, but they have continued covering the story since Feb. 4. That’s when the paper first reported Lancaster County Coroner Gary Kirchner was under investigation by the grand jury for allegedly divulging the office website’s access code, which is only available to law enforcement personnel. Call it one of the many tragic ironies of our brief history as a country. After all, this is Pennsylvania, the home of Ben Franklin, who made his first fortune in the publishing trade berating and belittling monarchs and would-be kings, and other Founding Fathers. Or call it just another unfortunate byproduct of the War on Terror. Here’s what a “flabbergasted” RCFP Executive Director Lucy Dalglish called it: “[H]orrifying, an editor's worst nightmare," Dalglish told the Philadelphia Inquirer (www.philly.com). On March 13, the Inquirer reported that Senior Deputy Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach stated that she did not believe this was a case of a journalist's right to protect a source, but an attempt to use the First Amendment to shield a crime. Two weeks prior to that, the Inquirer’s John Shiffman reported that Senior Judge Barry F. Feudale had ruled in favor of the state’s motion to seize the computers. In the newspaper's subsequent appeal, William DeStefano, a lawyer for the Intelligencer, broke it down: "Permitting the attorney general to seize and search unfettered the workstations will result in the very chilling of information," DeStefano wrote. "Confidential tips, leads, and other forms of information will undoubtedly dry up once sources and potential sources learn that [the newspaper’s] workstations were taken out of its possession and turned over to investigations." But in the end, the state Supreme Court refused to hear the case, Feudale’s ruling stood and state investigators started wading through the computer files. Good citizens that they probably are, officials with the paper maintain they did nothing wrong and even offered to provide prosecutors with print versions of the information being sought, including emails. But that wasn’t good enough. “Feudale has stated that he will personally review all material before it is given to prosecutors,” according to the Reporters Committee report, presumably in order to filter out information outside the scope of the investigation. That’s not very reassuring. Judges are notoriously political animals, and often shamelessly cozy with prosecuting attorneys. That’s because all too often they are themselves former prosecutors. Judges are also extremely press-savvy, as one might expect of political animals, quite able to leak possibly sensitive and unpublished information for their own purposes to other reporters looking for scoops, and to others having nothing to do with the publishing business. Think of it: What would prevent Feudale — who clearly doesn’t mind sacrificing sacrosanct obligations to preserve and protect the Constitution in order to aid law enforcement — from dropping dime on another case, one not related to this one? Or what if investigators find information for a story about the judge or one of his family members, or friends, or associates? What then? Who’s looking over their shoulders? Needless to say, there’s probably a lot of sweating going on right now in Lancaster County officialdom. And, not to get side-tracked, that’s probably not such a bad thing. But that’s not the point. The question is: What is to stop Feudale, besides his word and his apparently limited commitment to preserving and defending our most cherished freedom, from divulging other sensitive yet unpublished and otherwise private information to other news agencies or other public agencies, like the FBI or Homeland Security? They are supposed to be investigating the website breach. But what are they really looking for? Especially in these perilous times, placing severe limits like this on the Constitution's guarantee of an unfettered press is too important for one person, even the most unimpeachable judge, to have the final say on what and what isn’t important to the public, no matter how important any individual case may happen to be at any given time. It makes one thankful that we live in California, a state where public officials cherish the tenets of the First Amendment and deeply respect the public's right to know. Such a thing could never happen here, could it? #
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