Many of you have followed Plamegate over the last year. This week, most of you have no doubt heard that a federal judge ruled that the reporters Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper must divulge their sources because their interpretation of the first amendment does not grant the press immunity from revealing their sources. Although many states have so called "shield laws" to specifically provide this right to reporters, since the jurisdiction in the case was federal, none of these applied.
Throughout the life span of Plamegate, I have personally felt conflicted. On one hand if the person who leaked Plame's identity was high enough up on the food chain, it could do serious damage to the Bush administration. On the other hand, I do believe that while the constitution is somewhat ambiguous on the matter, these reporters should have the right to keep their sources confidential.
What if this conflict of interest was intentional? Perhaps Plamegate was specifically engineered by the GOP for the purpose of setting a legal precedent that reporters do not have a constitutional right protecting them from revealing their sources. This would definitely make the deepthroats of the future, and all the anonymous sources you hear about in a Sy Hersh article think twice about talking.