Shield laws and journalist’s privilege: The basics every reporter should know
CBS is acting for Deep State.
And SAG-Aftra damn well knows this. And will do nothing more than talk.
I only read the first part of your article on shield laws, but it looks like they are meant to protect journalists from the courts over-zealously exposing their sources.
The reason I bring that up is because in most other industries, what you produce in the line of work actually belongs to your employer. If you code software for a company and leave that company, you can’t take that software with you. You can’t take your computer or it’s files, and you can’t take your project notes.
I definitely understand the desire to protect sources. It is basically the number one priority of any journalist, and even investigators in law and law enforcement, because you will never have any credibility and you wont develop new sources of information if people know you hang them out to dry.
However, I wonder if it isn’t more of a gray area when you are talking about all of their actual work.
If I were a lawyer, I would argue that you try to insert a false and totally incorrect premise. CBS requires no warrant to claim that which is their property.
The Herrige records at issue were maintained on CBS owned computers. Thus, Katherine did not own and had no rights to the contents of the storage media.
Paper records and notebooks might be different, but if developed during CBS employment, the records and notebooks belong to CBS.
Further, I will argue that if She did not manage storage on devices out of CBS reach, she made a grave personal error. She should have saved them to her own cloud repository