PRESS act protecting media sources sails through the U.S. House. Tell your Senator to pass it.

The Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act is bipartisan legislation that would shield news reporters from having to disclose their sources and other communications to the courts, with few exceptions. Legal threats along these lines are a common method used to censor and silence journalists and media outlets, and the act passed without opposition.

Crucially, the bill includes a broad, functional definition of "covered journalist" that applies to anyone who "regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, investigates, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public." As such, it avoids certain artificial constraints that featured in past bills, including a requirement that the covered journalist earn a living from reporting or be employed professionally by an institutional news organization. As we wrote recently in a friend-of-the-court brief in the Tim Burke case in Tampa, a functional approach is the best one.

One thing that we haven't covered as closely is that the bill avoids a major pitfall in earlier versions of the legislation: a broad exception for national security "leak" cases.

The bill has strong support from both parties in the U.S. Senate, but Republican Senator Tom Cotton killed it last year when it came up; without unanimous consent, there's not much time to get it done.

House passes PRESS Act [rcfp.org]