> Maybe such protection should be created, but that's a quite different question from the apparently common, but incorrect, belief that it existed (even as a de-facto practice) and has recently been abrogated
I think we should have some sort of common law press privilege, like the client-attorney privilege. The tricky part is figuring out who should be entitled to it, especially in this day and age of blogs and whatnot.
"accreditation" is pretty easy, and grants some rights and responsibilities for journalists in other countries. For example, journalist photographers in England get protections for their images that other photographers don't get.
That's a pretty intriguing idea, as is a sibling's thoughts on accreditation.
Are you aware of any sources that deal with this particular idea, or is it a pet theory? I'd be pretty interested in reading on any legal scholars discussing the idea.
A number of states have media-shield laws that protect reporters (in some cases, and for some definitions of "reporter") from being compelled to testify about sources in state-court proceedings. I don't know as much about those as I'd like; a plus of looking at them is that there's some history illustrating how they actually work in practice. To take one facet of "who counts as media?" that varies between states, here's an investigation of which states' media-shield laws cover student newspapers and the like: http://www.splc.org/knowyourrights/legalresearch.asp?id=60
One issue that comes up for me is that the justifications seem a lot stronger in some cases than others. For example, leaking the Pentagon Papers has some kind of public-interest justification, while the reporter linked above who leaked confidential testimony from the Charles Manson grand jury seems more like he was just looking for something sensational that would sell newspapers. But if a kind of public-interest/whistleblower restriction were included in a shield law, that would add probably undesirable ambiguity.
I think we should have some sort of common law press privilege, like the client-attorney privilege. The tricky part is figuring out who should be entitled to it, especially in this day and age of blogs and whatnot.