News & Opinion

Government leaks in Apple investigation underscore hypocrisy of BALCO press subpoenas by Peter Scheer Yet another reason the Justice Department should abandon its misguided effort to throw San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams into jail for refusing to name their confidential source in the BALCO case: Hypocrisy has its limits, even for the federal government. I’m referring to recent stories in the Wall Street Journal and other media detailing the feds’ investigation

Sacramento Bee’s new online pub experiments with time-shifting to boost value of the paper’s political reporting by Peter Scheer A few weeks ago I wrote in this space that newspapers, in their rush to generate ad revenues on the internet, had made a strategic mistake in giving away their news content, free, online. I suggested that, to reestablish the value of their content, metro papers should consider embargoing their news articles from the free Internet

PRESS RELEASE For Immediate Release Neil Budde, the head of news operations for internet portal Yahoo!, is the latest addition to the board of directors of the California First Amendment Coalition (CFAC), the nonprofit, public interest organization announced today. Budde, who joined Yahoo! In 2004, is Vice President, Editor in Chief for Yahoo! News, Finance and Sports. He works in Yahoo!’s Santa Monica offices, where the company’s news operations are based. “Neil brings to CFAC

Public officials’ love of secrecy is no match for the public’s love to watch government decision-making up close. In California, democratic voyeurism prevails. By Peter Scheer One of California’s more remarkable political inventions is the requirement that lawmakers do their lawmaking in the open for all to see. Call it the people’s entitlement to democratic voyeurism: Members of city councils, county supervisors and school boards (among other local legislative bodies) must not only vote in

An open letter to judges in the BALCO appeal: To learn the identity of the reporters’ confidential source, just ask their lawyer By Peter Scheer Honorable Judges of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Dear Sirs/Madams: A three-judge panel of this Court will soon consider appeals by the San Francisco Chronicle and two of its reporters from judgments of contempt for refusing to reveal their confidential source for stories about steroid use