The Press doesn’t lean on anonymous sources often. Most weeks, none of our stories need them. But when a resident calls with something they’re afraid to put their name to—allegations of misspent town funds or a public official crossing a line no one else has caught—we make a promise: We’ll protect you. Right now, Massachusetts law gives that promise almost nothing to stand on.
That’s what’s at stake in state Senate bill S.3200, the shield law amendment the upper house passed unanimously in July, folded into the broader public records bill now being hammered out between House and Senate negotiators before this session runs out. The bill would bar judges and grand juries from forcing a reporter to name a source unless prosecutors show, by clear and convincing evidence, that the information is unobtainable elsewhere and the public interest in disclosure outweighs identifying its source. That’s not a special privilege for journalists. It’s a floor under a promise readers already expect us to keep.
Massachusetts is one of just nine states without this protection; every state on our borders already has it. That’s strange for the state that gave the country its first constitutional guarantee of a free press in John Adams’ 1780 Declaration of Rights. It’s stranger still as reporters elsewhere are being subpoenaed and their homes raided for refusing to name sources.
Big outlets can absorb the legal bills when a subpoena lands; the Berkshire Eagle spent thousands defending reporter Larry Parnass against a subpoena issued by the Springfield Diocese for the notes and communications he collected in reporting its handling of historical clergy abuse. A paper our size can’t. One bad subpoena could end us, and with us, the trust of every source who ever believed we meant what we said.
It isn’t only newspapers making this ask—the ACLU of Massachusetts, Common Cause, and press groups from local weeklies to the Boston Globe are behind it too.
Sen. Jamie Eldridge and Rep. Dan Sena have represented Harvard well on the issues that matter to this town. We’re asking them to spend some of that capital now: Press your colleagues in the conference committee to keep the shield language intact and get it to the governor’s desk before the session ends. Small papers like ours, and the readers who trust us, are counting on it.