Justice Department shouldn't target journalists (sportswriters)

.. This is what Fainaru-Wada and Williams did: their job. Did it magnificently, too. They wrote hundreds of newsworthy stories that completed the trick Jose Canseco started by further removing the steroid genie from the sports needle, wrote a best-seller ("Game of Shadows"), forced politicians and Major League Baseball to act, affected societal change for the better. That's our First Amendment at its finest. And it was work performed by a couple of guys writing about sports.

Yet here came the Justice Department a week ago handing subpoenas to two skinny, middle-aged reporters in an attempt to get them to turn over any secret grand-jury testimony transcripts in their possession, the name of the person or persons who illegally leaked such material, and even the packaging in which these documents arrived.

They committed no wrongdoing. The leaker or leakers - among their many "whistleblowers," as the journalists called them - are the ones the feds seek. If it means throwing reporters in jail until they divulge their source or sources (something we're taught in journalism school to accept but never expect to actually experience), our government is cool with that.

Shut the messengers behind bars. Brilliant ..

http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/baseball/article/0,1406,KNS_318_4700003,00.html

This involves run of the mill perjury and sports corruption, which, while not good, doesn't seem anywhere near as compelling when it comes to making reporters reveal their sources.