by William Powers

This Leaky World

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TOKYO—"Court Upholds Media Right to Shield Sources." So reported the headline last week in the English-language version of one of Japan's largest newspapers, The Asahi Shimbun.

On one hand, it was the kind of news we're not used to seeing lately in the United States, where the trend has been running more along the lines of "Media Under Attack for Anonymous Leaks."

But even more surprising is the notion that other democratic countries are struggling with the same questions we're facing, about anonymous sources, the law, and the press.

America's media culture is just a tad self-absorbed, and we tend to assume that our problems are singular. Thus, the current debate about leaks and protecting sources is typically framed as a result of peculiarly domestic happenings. It took off with the Valerie Plame story. It went into overdrive a few weeks ago when reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post won Pulitzer Prizes for their stories about secret government operations. And the CIA's firing of suspected leaker Mary McCarthy raised the pitch even higher.

Further strengthening the impression that this is a uniquely American debate, many U.S. journalists feel that the tension over leaks is wholly a result of the Bush administration's relentless devaluing of the media.

The White House's hostility toward journalism is indisputable, but is it the sole reason that anonymous sourcing is all over the headlines and that everyone is talking about reporters going to jail?

Not if you look abroad. Australia, for instance, enacted a new sedition law as part of broad anti-terrorism legislation, and some observers already see a chilling effect on the news. "The risk of fines and jail terms prevents journalists from reporting details of detention orders and investigating possible miscarriages of justice," according to a recent story in The Australian newspaper. As in the U.S., some Australian public officials are pushing for a national "shield law" for journalists.

In Mexico, where drug cartels and gangs make journalism dangerous, the government last month adopted the Professional Secrecy Act, which allows journalists to protect their sources.

In the Japanese case covered in The Asahi Shimbun, reporters from several different outlets who did work on the same story—about alleged tax evasion by a U.S. company's Japanese subsidiary—have sought to protect their anonymous sources. In the most recent decision, the judge ruled that news sources are an "occupational secret" that reporters may, under certain circumstances, refuse to divulge. But in a separate decision, the same court held that one of the reporters in the case did not have the right to protect an anonymous source.

Why is this question popping up in so many places at once? Partly it's because the Washington-driven war on terror has raised the stakes of secrecy everywhere. But it's also a result of a broader trend you might call the digitization of society. Technology has made all kinds of information, from consumer data to satellite imagery, more accessible. And governments, corporations, and other entities that have an interest in keeping secrets find that accessibility threatening. Greater openness paradoxically breeds more secrecy. And reporters live at the intersection of the two trends.

As liberal democracies mature, they beget a drive to rationalize the gray areas, the parts of our collective life that do not have clean, consistent rules. Journalism based on anonymous sources is the premier example of this fuzzy zone. And all of the various responses to it, from jailing reporters to passing shield laws, are attempts to make things clear and binary: X is right, Y is wrong.

But fuzziness has a purpose. It's difficult to make hard-and-fast rules about confidential sources. The competing interests—the public's right to know, national security, and so on—all have legitimate claims.

Freedom of the press is a delicate dance, a never-ending series of judgment calls. The more tightly a society—any society—tries to define that freedom, the harder it becomes for journalists to do their jobs.

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