To a person, journalists (and psuedo-journalists like bloggers), including people I respect like Josh Marshall and Amy Sullivan, have consistently defended Robert Novak's right not to divulge his sources in the Valerie Plame outing.
This event, in case you have had your head under a rock for the past year, was where someone in the Bush administration, in retaliation for her husband embarrassing them by exposing them as liars during the rush to war with Iraq, leaked her identity as a covert CIA operative to Robert Novak. Divulging classified information is a felony and Novak, in concealing their identity, is aiding and abetting this felony.
There is a good reason why journalists should be allowed to protect their sources, in that it allows people to expose government or corporate wrongdoing and not suffer from retaliation. But this is entirely the opposite. Here the concealing of the sources allows government wrongdoing to occur, not be exposed. To be allowed to conceal such sources is an abuse of the intent of the first amendment.
If such things are allowed to occur there might come a time when we decided that a free press wasn't worth protecting at all. I doubt that Marshall and Sullivan and the rest would like to see that come to pass.
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