Media Organizations Lobby to Quash Certain E-mail Disclosures

John Cook, a senior national reporter and blogger for Yahoo! News, is miffed at The Associated Press for what he says appears to be collaboration with the government to deny a New York Freedom of Information Law request that seeks e-mails between New York Gov. David Paterson's former communications director, former press secretary, and various news organization representatives. Cook reports the Hearst Corporation objected to the release of the e-mails on grounds that confidential sources could have been revealed in the e-mails.

Cook claims David Schulz, a media attorney in private practice, had been making inquiries whether New York's journalist shield law could serve as a possible justification for denying the FOIL request. Cook quotes Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for a Free Press as describing the government's invocation of the shield law to protect a journalist's sources as "an almost comical inversion of the law's intended purpose -- to protect journalists from the government."

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