Protecting Confidential Sources: A Reporter's and a Lawyer's Perspective

Saturday, February 7
Start Time: 1:00 PM

Reporter John O'Brien from the Post-Standard and media attorney Louis Orbach of of Bond, Schoeneck & King, PLLC will discuss the importance of confidential sources to a free press.  Sponsored by the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) and the Media Law Research Center (MLRC) Institute. 

From Watergate and the Pentagon Papers to Iran-Contra and Abu Ghraib, journalists have used information from confidential sources to reveal illegal conduct by our government.  It is vital to our democracy that we protect the people who are the sources for the exposes that are reported in newspapers, magazines and books and broadcast in news programs on television and radio.  

 

John O'Brien (above, left) has been a reporter with The Post-Standard for 20 years.  He covered state and federal courts as a beat for 15 years, and for the past 4 years has been an investigative reporter on The Post-Standard's projects team.  In 1996, he and two other reporters wrote the book Goodbye, My Little Ones, about a mother who murdered her five children.  O'Brien has been the listed plaintiff, along with the newspaper, in at least five lawsuits in state and federal courts seeking access to government records.  He's a board member of the Syracuse Press Club and has won more than a dozen writing awards from the Associated Press and New York Publishers Association.  O'Brien graduated from SUNY Geneseo in 1981 with a bachelor's degree in English.

Louis Orbach (above, right) is a member of Bond, Schoeneck & King, PLLC and Chair of the firm's Media and Communications Law Practice Group.  He is a litigator with First Amendment and media law litigation experience, including the representation of  journalists asserting the reporter's privilege, the litigation of copyright matters, and the defense of defamation claims.   Orbach also regularly provides media clients with prepublication review and advice on libel issues.   He has been a Guest Lecturer on the First Amendment and the Press at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and at several annual conventions of the New York Press Association.   Orbach received his Juris Doctor, magna cum laude, from the University of Michigan Law School in 1993.