Bar Punts on Ethics Complaint Over Application to Search Reporter’s Home; The New York Times, February 12, 2026

Charlie Savage, The New York Times; Bar Punts on Ethics Complaint Over Application to Search Reporter’s Home

A press freedom group accused a prosecutor of violating an ethics rule by not telling a judge about a law limiting searches for journalistic work product.

"The Virginia State Bar has told a press freedom organization that it is up to a judge to decide whether a federal prosecutor mishandled an application for a warrant last month to search the home of a Washington Post reporter as part of a leak investigation.

The group, Freedom of the Press Foundation, had filed a disciplinary complaint with the bar against the prosecutor, Gordon D. Kromberg. It cited his failure to alert the magistrate judge, who approved the search warrant, about the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, which limits searches for journalistic work product.

But in an unsigned letter viewed by The New York Times, the state bar said the judge, William B. Porter of the Eastern District of Virginia, had to evaluate the omission."

Shepard Smith, Late of Fox News, Gives $500,000 to a Free Press Group; The New York Times, November 21, 2019

Michael M. Grynbaum, The New York Times; Shepard Smith, Late of Fox News, Gives $500,000 to a Free Press Group

"“Our belief a decade ago that the online revolution would liberate us now seems a bit premature, doesn’t it?” Mr. Smith said in his customary Mississippi lilt. “Autocrats have learned how to use those same online tools to shore up their power. They flood the world of information with garbage and lies, masquerading as news. There’s a phrase for that.”...

The Committee to Protect Journalists, founded in 1981, works to advance press freedoms, particularly in dictatorial and autocratic countries. In recent years, speakers at its gala have increasingly referred to Mr. Trump’s attacks on the press and the hostile atmosphere faced by American journalists.

On Thursday, the group presented its Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award to Zaffar Abbas, the editor of a daily Pakistani newspaper, Dawn. The other honorees were Patrícia Campos Mello, a journalist at a Brazilian publication, Folha de S. Paulo; Neha Dixit, a freelance investigative journalist in India; two Nicaraguan broadcast journalists, Lucía Pineda Ubau and Miguel Mora, who were imprisoned for 172 days on false charges; and Maxence Melo Mubyazi, a journalist in Tanzania."