I guess if you're a journalist and you help a friend commit a crime, most of your colleagues in the media would fight for your right to keep your mouth shut. After all, if you keep your source confidential during a police investigation of some random politician, everyone seems to cheer.
Isn't it nice when you work in a profession that equates its own aiding and abetting of possible criminals with integrity? Personally, I call it covering your own ass so that all the other slimy politicians will still have the nerve to manipulate you.
Here's a news bulletin to all the journalists out there. You hang out with scumbags, kiss their anonymous asses, and act as their personal pawns as you provide an outlet for all their politically motivated leaks, many of which threaten the security of the free world. There is nothing particularly respectable about this.
Reporters who know about crimes (and priests who hear confessions of crimes) should have the same responsibilities as the rest of us. Since when did freedom of the press mean the freedom to obstruct justice? If anything, these assholes in the media deserve fewer rights, not more of them. Nevertheless, we'll give them a break and just let them be equal to the rest of us. When the Founding Fathers said "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press", they didn't mean there would be special laws to protect you from withholding evidence.
It's one thing if police, courts, or Congress search for information in unjust ways. It's another thing when journalists refuse to give a source because somehow their life's work is treated as more important than, say, the guy who throws my trash into the back of a truck. If the garbage man sees evidence of a crime leftover in some dumpster, I expect him to answer cops' questions about it. I expect the same from these ventriloquist-dummy, leg-humping distorters of doubletalk. Of course, they're also free to shut their mouths and open them up again for the prison food.
(Speaking of which, do you have a knowledge of food preparation, an interest in making emergency decisions concerning food service operations, and want free training in CPR, firearms, and unarmed self-defense? Then become a Food Service Assistant at a North Carolina prison. Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.)
