Comfort the Afflicted & Afflict the Comfortable

Our guest speaker Don Meyers, gave us this lovely quote while telling us about the Journalism business in class last week. What I found that I liked most about the discussion we had was about the Federal Shield Laws. I didn't know too much about it, so I did some research about them. The Society of Professional Journalists have an article (http://www.spj.org/shieldlaw.asp) with some details about the bill and why we really need to have one, so I officially have a stance. There are situations, where journalists have been incarcerated for not giving up their sources, and I do not agree with it. If the public needs to know of a certain event, and the only way they can is for an anonymous source to tell that story, why should the journalist be punished for that? How can they be loyal to their citizens if they cannot tell the entire story without getting in trouble? What's worse is that Meyers said if the bill gets shot down it will probably be another five years before it has another chance at getting passed. If the next Watergate scandal happened today, would it be overshadowed by the journalist who wouldn't be willing to tell their source? I hope not, because as much as I would like to think that the government is doing everything right, I would want to be told if they weren't. And whoever exposed them would not be a criminal; as a matter of fact, they would probably be my hero.

It was also interesting to hear how sensitive Meyers editors were to his religion when the former prophet died. It was good to know that there are people who take events like that into consideration. It makes me a little more optimistic about entering the workforce. Hopefully I find myself in a similar situation. :-)