One of the things that makes America exceptional is that journalists here have freedoms that exist nowhere else. One of them is the freedom to publish information the government wants to keep secret. That also requires the freedom to rely on confidential sources to get that information.
As has been true at other times—the Pentagon Papers in 1971, the government’s secret investigation of Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2013—that freedom is now in jeopardy. The journalist Catherine Herridge is being punished for refusing to hand her sources over to the subject of a series of stories she aired back in 2017. The case could ruin her financially and might even lead to time in prison. What’s more, the courts are not allowing journalists to hear the entire case. Why? Because it involves supposedly secret government documents—exactly the kind of documents journalists work to expose.
The backstory: As an investigative reporter with Fox News, Herridge reported that the Department of Justice was probing a Chinese scientist and educator named Yanping Chen. The Fox pieces detailed Chen’s ties to the People’s Liberation Army and how her U.S. government–funded school marketed to American military personnel. U.S. regulators and lawmakers were concerned that data from the school could be shared with Beijing, according to Herridge’s reporting.