Arlen Specter is the POS who was pushing - no doubt still is pushing- for a media shield law, otherwise known as the Propgandists' Shield Law.
The Plame/Wilson/Slimes/WashPo freakshow was all about shielding the media and the truly dangerous leakers of national intelligence from any and all accountability. They must be free to lie and deceive abut to them freedom isn't enough- they must DENY legitimacy to all competitors.
And by competitors they mean us. We, the people...
They want to create a new class of citizen- by depriving all other American citizens of our own personal status as fully fledged members of "the free press" -reporters in our own right armed with pen, soapbox, and these days, the blogosphere. They don't want upstart bloggers getting press passes and invitations to news conferences, being able to hold back our sources like they want to do, etc, and they certainly don't want common citizens to gain sufficient notoriety in their reporting. If everyone is a reporter then "sources" may bypass the old media and seek out alternate media and get news out without having it filtered by the established media giants.
Remember how outraged the various houses of presstitution were over Talon News getting a seat in the White House Press Corp? How dare the peasants aspire to the sacred guild of the elite... they ranted, smeared, and raved until Talon News was silenced.
The "old media" is an endangered species- and they know it -so they seek to be deified and set apart from the masses of proles with keyboards so they can lie unhindered and the public will be denied a voice, barred from getting press passes for one-man media outlets and denied legitimacy.
With a shield law I suppose thy will need a registration system of some sort where so-called "real" media reporters or press outlets can preregister and obtain the benefits of being able to use anonymous sources without risking contempt of court charges while all others deemed "less than media" such as bloggers will go without, subject to the law if a court asks for their documentation in a criminal investigation. So sources would have to go exclusively to the major media to remain anonymous.
erk...Propagandists
Excellent points - SPECTRE is a strong proponent of such a "media shield law" and it would do a lot to protect scumbags like Joe and Valerie, so they have a mutual interest in working together on it.....
The fact that any "Republican" would come anywhere near Joe and Valerie, for any purpose but to spit in their faces, shows both how little grasp of the real issues people like SPECTRE have, and how bad a job Republicans have done in getting out the real story of Pflamegate.
Of course, in the face of a propagandistic MSM, a dishonest 'Rat prosecutor like Fitzy, weasels like SPECTRE and Chafee, etc. it has been a steep uphill struggle, but now I fear the chances of any real investigation of Pflamegate have diminished just about to zero.