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On Friday, five news organizations announced that they had settled with Wen Ho Lee, the former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist. Lee garnered significant coverage from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, ABC News, and the Associated Press, among other news organizations, while he was being investigated for espionage by the F.B.I. The espionage charges against Lee were eventually dropped, though he did plead guilty to improper handling of restricted data. Lee subsequently sued federal officials for violating the Privacy Act, and he has now settled for $1,645,000 – almost half of which is being paid by the five news organizations above.

This is particularly notable because the news organizations were not actually named in the lawsuit. So why did they pay up? To avoid contempt charges against the journalists who covered Lee. Lee's suit alleged that his privacy had been violated when the government gave reporters information about his finances and polygraph tests, as well as other information. The reporters did not want to give up their sources for this information, and were to be fined and held in contempt for refusing to do so. In a statement, the five news organizations said they made the payment "to protect our confidential sources, to protect our journalists from further sanction and possible imprisonment and to protect our news organizations from potential exposure."

"The implications of this are just staggering," Jane Kirtley, a former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told the New York Sun. She warned, notes the Sun, that "the deal could encourage litigation and demands for payment in connection with mundane reports on hospital statements about those injured in crimes and accidents."

"The journalists found themselves between a rock and a hard place after years of seeking relief from the courts and finding none," ABC senior vice president Henry S. Hoberman told the New York Times. "Given the absence of a federal shield law and the consistently adverse rulings from the federal courts in this case, the only way the journalists could keep their bond with their sources and avoid further sanctions, which might include jail time, was to contribute to a settlement between the government and Wen Ho Lee that would end the case."

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