Fox Reporter Faces Jail Over Refusal to Identify Sources

Jana Winter, a 32-year-old investigative reporter with FoxNews.com, has said she will not disclose the names of two law enforcement officials she quoted in an article on July 25, when she reported that the suspect, James Holmes, kept a notebook filled with violent notes and drawings that he sent to his psychiatrist days before the shootings.

The case is in the pretrial phase, and a Colorado judge said last week that Ms. Winter could be held in contempt of court and serve up to six months in prison if she does not reveal who told her about the notebook. Lawyers for Mr. Holmes are eager to know who revealed the information to Ms. Winter.

Ms. Winter will attend a hearing in Colorado on Wednesday when lawyers are expected to interview a law officer to try to learn more about the leak. But the judge said late on Monday that he was not yet ready to decide whether he would order Ms. Winter to reveal her sources

Ms. Winter, who joined FoxNews.com four years ago from The New York Post, declined to comment for this article. Her lawyer, Dori Ann Hanswirth, said that disclosing the names of those who helped her would damage Ms. Winter’s career.

Cases involving potential prison time for reporters are often viewed as tests of press freedoms and the role of the First Amendment. But the Colorado case has attracted much less notice than the one involving Ms. Miller, the former reporter for The New York Times who in 2005 spent 85 days in jail for refusing to name her source behind a C.I.A. leak.

Still, journalists and civil liberties advocates have been calling attention to it, with some complaining that prominent media outlets would have given it more coverage if Ms. Winter worked for a news organization more liberal than Fox News.

On Twitter, Ms. Winter thanked reporters for their supportive posts. She also attracted the support of Ms. Miller, who wrote “Don’t let reporter Jana Winter go to jail.” Ms. Miller is now a contributor to Fox News.

While journalists commonly receive subpoenas, few actually end up going to jail for refusing to testify. George Freeman, a First Amendment lawyer with the law firm Jenner Block, who represented Ms. Miller when he worked for The Times, said that Ms. Winter’s case did not seem to warrant jail time.

Mr. Freeman said courts should be able to force journalists to reveal their sources only in “extraordinary circumstances,” adding, “The facts in this case don’t seem to warrant it at all.”

Ms. Winter, who is based in New York and has covered other prominent criminal cases like the Newtown, Conn., shootings, received a subpoena on March 7 and was asked to report to Colorado for a hearing on April 1. She was then asked to return for Wednesday’s hearing. Judge Carlos Samour could eventually ask Ms. Winter to testify, but on Monday he said that he would not rule on Ms. Winter’s testimony until he decided whether the notebook was admissible.

Ms. Hanswirth, her lawyer, said the case had been “very hard emotionally on Jana” and also had been costly for taxpayers. She added that because Mr. Holmes’s public defenders had requested that Ms. Winter testify, expenses for her travel were being paid with public money.

In an 18-page affidavit written in support of Ms. Winter’s position, Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, said there were too many flaws in the argument for compelling her testimony. He said revealing Ms. Winter’s source would not increase the fairness of Mr. Holmes’s trial because “once the news has broken, it cannot be unbroken.” He added that other news outlets had also reported the same news.

“The notion that this minor story on Fox could taint the jury pool is ludicrous,” Mr. Feldstein said. “The story that Fox did is not just a drop in the bucket, it’s a drop in the ocean.”

“If you required reporters to disclose their sources every time there was a minor leak in a high profile criminal case, the jails would be filled in America with journalists,” he added.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/business/media/fox-reporter-faces-jail-over-refusal-to-identify-sources.html?partner=rss&emc=rss