Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The New Abridged Reporter's Privilege: Policies, Principles And Pathological Perspectives, Erik Ugland

Erik Ugland

This Article contends that contemporary arguments about the reporter’s privilege are increasingly situated within a divided framework in which protections for confidential and nonconfidential information are treated as separate interests that lack a shared theoretical justification. This is both a cause and consequence of a broader tendency among judges, legislators, journalists and lawyers to emphasize policy-based conceptions of the privilege that are focused on case-specific calculations of harms and benefits, rather than principle-based conceptions focused on journalistic autonomy and the need for a structural separation of press and government. Policy arguments present the privilege as a narrow, utilitarian device for …