The Perennial Fight

I go back and forth over whether journalists should be exempt from being forced to turn over their notes to government officials. As a reporter myself, I have a tendency to believe journalists should not be granted any privilege other citizens are not granted.
In the end, howevery, I almost always come down on the side of protecting the right of journalists to not supply information to the police. Simply put, I think this guy's lawyers got it right. If the government can force journalists to turn over information, then journalists become just another type of government investigator. The power of the media rests in the fact that it does not serve the government. As soon as the media starts serving the government it ceases to exist, at least in the form intended by the writers of the Constitution.

Besides, this is just weak:

Federal prosecutors demanded the rest of the tapes, saying they might contain evidence of attempted arson of a police cruiser -- which Wolf says they do not. Trying to burn a police car would constitute a federal crime, federal authorities argued, because the Police Department receives money from Washington. (emphasis mine)

As is this:

"There's no Deep Throat out there trying to protect his identity," the judge said. Noting that the events Wolf photographed all took place in public, Alsup asked, "Where does Mr. Wolf get to decide what will or will not be made public, when he never made a promise to anyone?"

If the event took place in public, it was already "made public." The problem isn't the public nature of the event, it's that the police didn't witness it, have no evidence it happened, and want to force a journalist to provide them with the evidence they couldn't collect on their own. Basically, they want to, after the fact, make Wolf's video do the job they wouldn't or couldn't do at the time. They want to make him a police informant. That's something no government official in a free country should be permitted to do.

On a related point: I have little sympathy for the police in regards to investigations of demonstrations. In the past, what information has been collected has been misused too often for any journalist to ever fully trust that any information they provide will be used the way police officials say it will. For that, the police, prosecutors, courts, etc., have only themselves to blame.