Urgent: Support federal Shield law

I've given over a lot of the space on this page this week to a guest editorial written by Kevin Z. Smith, currently president of the Society of Professional Journalists.

I do hope you take the time to read it.

The topic deals with a federal Senate bill that would, for the first time ever, offer journalists in the United States the same types of protection that 49 states already offer when dealing with confidential sources.

As a rule, the Valley Post avoids using information from anonymous sources in local stories, so this rarely becomes an issue for us.

However, there are times when the information is so compelling and the local officials so adamant about keeping the information from the public eye that even small, community-oriented journalists must sometimes agree to keep a local source confidential.

Even in these rare cases, however, the Editor is always informed of the identity of the anonymous source.

We also try to verify all information from at least two independent sources unless we can trace it back to a public document of some sort such as a police log entry, an officer's report, an internal memo or some other verifiable document.

Rather than write my own editorial on the matter, I chose to use Kevin Z. Smith's national perspective because it provides some recent examples of high importance in which the public was best served by a journalist who relied upon information from a confidential source.

Again, please read it and support the federal Shield law.