The truth, from an unexpected source.

From Tuesday's Ft. Wayne Journal-Gazette: Jailing journalists hurts your rights, too

Source confidentiality is the cornerstone of good journalism, particularly journalism that makes a difference; once journalists start selling out their sources because the authorities wave jail time at them, the notion of a free press is as dead as Elvis.

We might as well all change our names to Fox News, throw the First Amendment on the fire and toast marshmallows over it.
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That’s fine. I get that. I even get the argument, though I’m not sure I buy it, that sometimes national security outweighs the canons of a free press. My problem with that is, a lot of times “national security” can best be translated as “I’m doing something that’s six kinds of illegal and I don’t want anyone to know about it.”

My problem this time around is, Barry Bonds isn’t threatening to fly the red-eye out of L.A. into a skyscraper.

There’s no national security issue here, no shadowy plot to take down the republic (unless you consider the Tampa Bay Devil Rays a plot to undermine national confidence in one of our bulwark institutions). There’s only two reporters doing their jobs, an administration hostile to reporters doing their jobs, and prosecutors who want to take the easy way out.

Normally, I expect the sports page to be simplistic and vaguely conservative. When I opened the Tuesday paper at work, I found this instead - an editorial by FWJG sports reporter Ben Smith saying that the jailing of Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, the two San Francisco Chronicle writers who blew open the Barry Bonds-BALCO debacle, is harmful to the nation as a whole because it is, quite frankly, stifling the free press.

Even moreso, it includes a few nuggets of wisdom you rarely see on the sports beat - most notably, the outright hostility of the administration towards investigative journalism and the invocation of "national security" as a way of trying to keep anyone from knowing what's really going on. Considering the flap that's been made lately over things being kept under wraps because of, you guessed it, "national security", it's pretty hard not to agree with Smith's assessments.