Following the Justice Department’s subpoena to access the phone records of reporters at the Associated Press, the White House is pushing for legislation to provide greater protection to
reporters that keep their sources confidential. The bill would be a revision of the 2009 Free Flow of Information Act. According to the Times, “The version the Obama administration is seeking to
revive, however, is the one that was chiefly sponsored by Senator Schumer, which was negotiated between the newspaper industry and the White House. It was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in
a bipartisan 15-to-4 vote in December 2009. But while it was awaiting a floor vote in 2010, a furor over leaking arose after WikiLeaks began publishing archives of secret government documents, and the
bill never received a vote.”
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