The president, he said, was a committed advocate of First Amendment rights -- the word "unfettered" was used multiple times to describe how Obama believes the press should operate -- and a supporter of shield laws to protect a reporter-source relationship.
However, a Hollywood Reporter source said Hilton had been scheduled to view an apartment in her building without knowing she lived there.
When the federal police go knocking on the doors of a reporter's sources, sources will soon dry up.
No one would disagree that the credibility of a reporter's source is an integral part of what's printed.
The lines separating reporter, source provider and reader/viewer have, in some cases, become non-existent.
It is highly unusual to seek access to a reporter's sources, and officials said that as a result such investigations of leaks are notoriously tough to succeed.
In this case, the burning issue is not the confidentiality of a reporter's sources or notes, a subject often fought over in American courts, the lawyers said, but the principle of when and why a reporter working in a war zone or an area of conflict can be summoned to appear as a witness.
Davies told of how reporters for News of the World routinely tapped phone messages, producing verbatim dialogue that could only have come from illegal intercepts, and yet Murdoch's editors, whose job it is to monitor a reporter's sources, professed their innocence.
The Boucher-Pence bill is not perfect — its language describing when a court can reach a reporter's sources on national-security grounds is looser than I would like — but it is a politically plausible bill, and it is much, much better than the status quo.
"I'm sure it's true that it helps with bosses and future employers to gain a reputation as a reporter with sources who gets juicy leaks," Rosen wrote in an email.
If you were a reporter, or a source, you would wonder how you could safely meet.
