Director's Notes: Caution

• Banned.  The Pentagon banned four reporters from covering future military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba after they published the name of an Army interrogator who was a witness at a hearing there this week. Two attendees of last year's McCormick Foundation Military-Media Conference were involved in the story.  McClatchy Newspapers correspondent Nancy A. Youssef wrote the May 7 story about the messy situation involving reporters from McClatchy's Miami Herald and three Canadian news organizations. Conference participant Col. David Lapan, the director of Defense Press Operations at the Pentagon, said the ban affects only the individual reporters and that their organizations would be allowed to send other reporters to future hearings. "We have been covering Guantanamo for years and we've always played by the rules--and we did in this case as well," said Mindy Marques, managing editor of the Miami Herald. The issue at hand is that the witness had  been previously publically identified. “That reporters are being punished for disclosing information that has been publicly available for years is nothing short of absurd,” said Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union.  McCormick Foundation grantee Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, called the drastic bans part of “a long history of lack of access for journalists covering military tribunals and other events at Guantanamo Bay.” What do you think about the reason these reporters are being banned? 
• Downside of Facebook Journalism.  The hazard of "hurry-up" Web journalism reporting took center stage this week. When the identity of the alleged, would-be Times Square bomber was surfacing, the Huffington Post was quick to publish a photo of the wrong Faisal Shahzad, taken from a Facebook page. The case of mistaken identity was eventually corrected. As an article in the Christian Science Monitor warns, “Facebook journalism is a tricky science, and it almost certainly should never involve the publication of photographs of a person whom you think might be an alleged terrorist, and then again, might just be a normal dude. That's the kind of thing that can put someone in danger.”   
• How far are Journalists protected? Bloomberg Businessweek reports that The First Amendment Coalition and six media organizations are asking to see the affidavit filed by investigators who obtained a warrant to search the home of a technology blog editor at Gizmodo.com. The  April blog post revealed secret information about an Apple prototype iPhone, based on a allegedly stolen product they bought  from a college student who said he found it in a bar. “A warrant is a very intrusive device, especially for a journalist,” Peter Scheer, an attorney and executive director of the San Rafael, California-based media group, said. “Affidavits are supposed to be public records and the public has a legitimate interest in seeing that the process used to get the warrant was fair.” A Superior Court Judge in Redwood City, Calif. refused to consider the request.  The warrant violates California’s newsroom search act. Is this pushing the boundary of a journalist's right to report?  
• Quote of the Week: “Democracies die behind closed doors  . . . When government begins closing doors  . . .  it selectively controls information rightfully belonging to the people.  Selective information is misinformation. The Framers of the First Amendment . . . did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us . . . They protected the people against secret government.” -Judge Damon J. Keith,  (Detroit Free Press v. Ashcroft, 2002)