Ten years ago this month began a period of my life that I have come to call my season in hell. It was a prolonged horror of court hearings and depositions following the collapse of The Cincinnati Enquirer’s investigation of Chiquita Brands International. But like all calamities, it delivered unexpected insights. One of the most important for me was a fierce love of shield laws. To all journalists everywhere: you should love them too. These laws are fundamental to what we do. We should be fighting to get a federal shield law passed. So should every citizen who suspects that powerful institutions in our society regularly hide vital information from the public. After years of an uneasy truce between prosecutors and media organizations, federal officials have increasingly been dragging reporters to court and pressing them to reveal confidential sources. It is time to push back.

A decade ago, I learned the hard way that a shield law is one of the most important press protections we have. Shield laws, of course, give journalists the right to keep the names of sources confidential in legal proceedings. They are on the books in thirty-two states and the District of Columbia. Another seventeen states have upheld the idea of reportorial privilege in court cases (Wyoming is the only holdout). But no federal equivalent exists, despite repeated efforts in Congress.

My shield-law saga began on May 3, 1998, when the Enquirer published an eighteen-page special report, CHIQUITA SECRETS REVEALED, which detailed the political, legal, and economic woes of the huge Cincinnati-based banana company. As the number-two reporter on the project, I researched the troubled history of trade disputes between Chiquita and the European Union. I investigated environmental problems caused by pesticide use in banana production in Costa Rica. I interviewed displaced villagers in...

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