The Bush administration told lie after lie to convince the nation to go to war with Iraq. The New York Times repeated those lies one after the other. Very few news organizations did their homework.
So what does the New York Times want in return? The New York Times wants protection from being forced to tell who told the lies. The protection comes in the form of a federal shield law and their desire is stated directly in The Public’s Right to Know
The problem is not one of national security, but one of the public's right to know. The New York Times participated in the cover up of the public's right to learn how Scooter ran a misinformation campaign from the White House to get Ambassador Wilson. The Times was not interested in printing all the truth fit to print. No way. The Times is only interested in the public not knowing how in bed they were (are) with the Bush administration.
So what do they want for the future? A law to prevent the truth from ever being revealed. This is a terrible law, that does not address the problem of conspiracy between the press and the government to hide the truth. The conspiracy is simple. The press is allowed to reference high level government officials and in return those officials get to spin the public story.
The ever widening distribution of news by different media makes the news ever cheaper to distribute. At the same time real journalism can be made less expensive to produce by reducing competition so fewer journalists are needed. Journalism is people intensive. At the same time the public has more entertainment options than the comics. The news itself, best exemplified by the The USA Today has become little more than a sound bite that can be editorialized and exploited with no thinking necessary.
I agree the news does need protection, but only if the news media is split into hundreds of thousands of independent news sources with a huge premium on independence. Having a few corporate news media sources controlling some 90% of the news seen by the public with a substantial amount of that on Spears, in unacceptable. Then to protect those corporations from disclosing their ties to elite rulers of the nation is unacceptable. This is corporate fascism.
This law is terrible for the country. We can and must do better.