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A recent ruling by a Clark County district judge has bolstered Nevada’s already-strong shield law.
As explained in this story by Sandra Chereb for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the shield was extended to a documentary filmmaker who had interviewed a witness in a criminal trial.
Lawyers for Robert Sharpe III, who was convicted of kidnapping, sex trafficking and assault, had sought notes and video interviews that filmmaker Joanna Friedman had conducted with a woman who testified against Sharpe.
But District Judge Richard Scotti ruled against the request, citing Nevada’s statute that protects journalists from being forced to turn over their notes for any legal proceeding.
Significance of the ruling
The significance of Scotti’s ruling is in reading the shield law to cover a documentary filmmaker. The statute itself says it covers employees of newspapers, television and radio stations.
By coincidence, I was on a panel in Las Vegas a week earlier to discuss whether the Nevada shield law needs to be amended to make sure it covers people like bloggers who wouldn’t be considered employees of traditional news media.
The panel discussion was led by Patrick File, a journalism professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, for a session of the Broadcast Education Association. Included were University of Nevada, Las Vegas professors Stephen Bates and Linda Berger, Freedom of the Press Foundation Director Trevor Timm and former reporter Matt Ward, who wrote a master’s thesis on the topic.
It came about as a result of a 2014 proposal by Bates to bring a bill to the 2015 Nevada Legislature amending the shield statute. In essence, instead of protecting certain journalists, it would have extended the law to protect acts of journalism.
At the time, I raised my doubts. I was worried legislators would weaken the law, rather than broaden it.
If this case is headed to the Supreme Court, as the lawyers say in the RJ story, it will test my theory that the courts are willing to consider the intent of the statue over the plain language. That’s what the judge did here.
The same thing happened back in 2014, about the time revisions to the shield law were being discussed (and eventually dropped), when a district judge saw the Mesquite Citizen Journal as an online newspaper, and said as much.
“Saying that the MCJ is not a newspaper just because it’s online only is like saying someone isn’t reading a book just because it’s on a Kindle.”
Yes, the law should be broadened. Yes, I’m still leery of sending it to a legislative committee, where law-enforcement lobbyists will raise the specter of anybody being a journalist.
In the meantime, as I said during the panel, the definitions of journalist and newspaper continue to evolve.
It is really on the next front that Timm, from the Freedom of the Press Foundation, sounded a dire warning.
A shield law becomes irrelevant, he pointed out, when the government continues to spy on reporters and obtain their sources through “national security” surveillance.
The old way of doing things was to drag a reporter into court. The new way is to eavesdrop or obtain their phone records.
It’s frightening stuff that most reporters haven’t had to deal with — yet.
