Jay Solomon, writing for The Free Press, wants legal protection for whistleblowers, and under the color of that, he also wants protection for journalists who are harboring “confidential,” or some such, sources.

One of the things that makes America exceptional is that journalists here have freedoms that exist nowhere else. … That also requires the freedom to rely on confidential sources to get that information.

The problem with this is that actual whistleblowers already have lots of legal protection for what they run up their chains of command, to Congress, and ultimately to the public. Beyond that, the freedom that that exists nowhere else apparently includes freedom from the laws that ordinary Americans must obey: laws barring receiving and profiting from goods that were illegally obtained by the transferor.

What Solomon wants, what he’s conflating with whistleblower disclosures, even though he should know better, is protection for journalists who publish leaks, those illegally obtained goods (which might—might—be OK), and for leakers who are doing the leaking.

Some sources who talk to journalists are, in fact, whistleblowers. Most, though, are simply acting, on the face of it, illegally, by transferring those goods—which maybe they obtained illegally or maybe they obtained in the legitimate course of their duties—in violation of the terms of their employment or their oaths of office. These leakers also are hiding behind anonymity, supposedly out of fear for their jobs—but that just shows either their recognition of the illegality of their actions or their own lack of moral principles as they put their jobs ahead of their moral obligation to do a right thing, or both. Leakers are entitled to no protection whatsoever.

Moreover, journalistic claims that a source is a whistleblower doesn’t make it so. The journalist must provide evidence that the claimed source is, in fact, a whistleblower, vis., evidence that the source has exhausted all of his whistleblower avenues. Having shown that, the journalist must—at the very least for credibility’s sake—identify the whistleblower. A whistleblower source no longer needs anonymity; he has the legal protections of whistleblowing. The whistleblower work environment might still be uncomfortable, but in that case, refer to “job ahead of doing a right thing” above.

In the particular case at Solomon’s hand, in which a reporter is being held in legal jeopardy over her refusal to reveal the source(s) she used in her reporting in 2017, the reporter throughout her reporting and at all opportunities since, declined to provide any evidence at all that her source(s), which she claims were whistleblowers, were in fact whistleblowers and that those sources had exhausted all of their whistleblowing avenues within the organizations that employed them, before the source(s) talked to the reporter. As a result of the reporter’s refusal to reveal her source(s),

In February, US District Court judge Christopher Cooper held her in contempt of court—and fined her $800 a day—until she turned over her confidential sources. Although he said he “recognizes the paramount importance of a free press in our society and the critical role that confidential sources play in the work of investigative journalists like Herridge,” he added that he was required to strike a balance between press freedom and that Yanping Chen’s “need for the requested evidence overcomes Herridge’s qualified First Amendment privilege in this case.”

Solomon, like the judge (despite his on the whole correct ruling) is conflating whistleblower with confidential source, even though the two are distinctly separate from each other, similar only in their willingness to talk to reporters, but radically different in the legal protections they have.

Press freedom advocates, however, fear that [the judge’s] ruling against Herridge could cripple the ability of journalists to protect whistleblowers and confidential sources to provide critical information to the public.

Solomon, and his press freedom advocates, are making a specious argument with this claim. Whistleblowers need no journalistic protection. Leakers deserve none.

Overarching that, in years past, editors required reporters to have in their articles at least two on-the-record sources that corroborate the claims of their “confidential” sources. The press industry has long since walked away from that requirement, and no one in the industry has been willing since to say what publicly available and concretely measurable standard of journalistic integrity is in use today in place of that erstwhile standard.

Those on-the-record sources are all the protection journalists would need, too, were today’s journalists not too lazy to find and use them.