Kristin Deasy is an online assistant editor for USA TODAY and can be reached at kdeasy@usatoday.com.

A FEDERAL SHIELD LAW MOVED closer to reality with the backing of presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, who pledged their support at Capital Conference '08, the joint convention of ASNE and the Newspaper Association of America.

Hillary Clinton, who suspended her campaign for the Democratic nomination in June, is a co-sponsor of the bill.

During separate appearances at the convention, McCain, a Republican, and Democrats Obama and Clinton said they would support the Free Flow of Information Act, which would provide federal protection for reporters working with confidential sources.

"The time is now," said Paul Boyle, NAA's senior vice president for public policy. "We have a lot of momentum for the bill."

Boyle, who leads a coalition of more than 50 media companies and organizations that support a federal shield law, gave the bill a 60-40 chance of being enacted by the end of this year.

Even high-profile endorsements cannot ensure the legislation will become law, but with McCain's and Obama's support, a veto by President Bush, even if sustained, wouldn't mean a dead end for the bill.

"By my count, we have the votes to override," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. If the votes were to fall through, the legislation would be delayed only until the next administration takes office.

The U.S. House of Representatives approved the legislation by a 398-21 vote last October, and the bill was expected to come before the Senate this summer.

Forty-one state attorneys general have signed a letter urging Congress to support the federal shield law. Douglas Gansler from Maryland and Rob McKenna from Washington led the National Association of Attorneys General effort.

Some form of federal shield law legislation has been introduced in Congress for the last three decades (99 separate shield law bills were introduced in Congress between 1973 and 1978, according to Dalglish). But recent high-profile cases involving Judith Miller, formerly of The New York Times, and Toni Locy, formerly of USA TODAY, have added urgency to the legislation.

Beyond support for the shield law, each of the three candidates expressed more general views about the need for openness in government. McCain spoke about the importance of a dialogue with reporters - the "long back and forths," as he called them.

Obama emphasized the news media's role in the "critical debate" taking place this election year, and Clinton ticked off the changes necessary for a more open administration, using the opportunity to criticize President George Bush and his administration for creating an era of secrecy.

All three had laudatory things to say about the press' watchdog function, but the candidates' sometimes prickly relations with the media in the past hasn't been consistent with the transparency they advocate.

At the conference, McCain's endorsement of the shield law was less than enthusiastic. "The shield law would give great license to you and your sources, with few restrictions, to do as you please no matter the stakes involved and without fear of personal consequences beyond the rebuke of your individual consciences," he said. "It is, frankly, a license to do harm, perhaps serious harm. But it is also a license to do good, to disclose injustice and unlawfulness and inequities, and to encourage their swift correction." On balance, he said, "I have narrowly decided to support it."

The Republican candidate also offered what he called a little constructive criticism for the assembled editors and publishers: "The workings of American newsrooms are some of the least transparent enterprises in the country, and it is easy to believe that the press has one set of standards for government, business and other institutions, and entirely another for themselves. ... I think that is an impression the press should work on correcting."

McCain, known for being unusually accessible to reporters aboard his Straight Talk Express campaign bus, said he endorses "direct, lengthy and frequent exchanges with the press," though he admitted the process can be painful at times. He has promised, if elected, to hold weekly news conferences.

Although McCain has jokingly called reporters "my base," his relationship with hometown media has been rocky at times, particularly when he and four Senate colleagues came under fire for intervening with federal regulators on behalf of a campaign contributor, savings and loan executive Charles Keating.

A 2006 Republic article on McCain's temper so provoked the senator that he warned the Republic's Washington reporter through his then-chief campaign strategist that he was "off the bus" if McCain ran for president. However, Republic reporters were not kept off the bus.

Former Republic editor Ward Bushee, now at the San Francisco Chronicle, found McCain "straightforward, open and forthcoming ... particularly in regard to his part in the Keating Five," but agreed that the paper's relationship with McCain has been difficult at times.

It's possible that similar problems could resurface on the national level, Bushee said in an e-mail. But he said he believes "McCain would be open, candid and more accessible than President Bush. I don't see him ducking questions. But also he might out a reporter or news organization if he doesn't like the way he's being covered, if the Republic is any lens to the future."

Obama's appearance at The Associated Press luncheon, which occurred as part of Capital Conference '08, came during a rough patch for his campaign. After the relatively gentle early media treatment, the Illinois Democrat was on the defensive over his remarks about "bitter" small-town voters clinging to guns and religion. "I know I kept a lot of you guys busy this weekend with the comments I made last week. Some of you might even be a little bitter about that," he quipped.

After apologizing for his "poor word choices," Obama used his prepared remarks to reiterate his campaign themes about the need for change in the nation's economic and social policies. He became more media specific during the question-and-answer session that followed his speech. "I certainly benefited at least from novelty," he said of the favorable press coverage early in his campaign. "It wasn't that long before that phase played itself out, you know, thanks I think to some thoughtfully skeptical and cynical reporting."

Some reporters covering the Obama campaign have expressed concern about their access to the candidate on the campaign trail, and presumably what that could mean in future dealings. "The barriers around the press area at Obama events went from easily penetrable, fabric-rope lines to interlocking metal gates manned by vigilant gatekeepers," observed Carrie Brown, who writes for Politico.

Reporters covering the presidential campaign were taken by surprise when Obama met secretly with Hillary Clinton to talk about uniting the Democratic Party just hours before she endorsed him.

In terms of dealing with the press, "The Obama campaign is a bit of an odd duck," according to The Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz. "It is not obsessed with winning each news cycle."

Newsweek correspondent Richard Wolffe told Kurtz the Obama campaign sees "the national media more as a logistical problem than a channel for getting stuff out."

Clinton opened her ASNE/NAA address with a joke about keeping her speech entirely off the record. She went on to praise journalists' efforts "to convey to your readership the scope and scale of the challenges and opportunities confronting our nation and our world" and singled out The Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning series on deplorable conditions for outpatients at Walter Reed hospital as an example of "the still very profound power of the traditional press to both serve and shape the public interest."

Regarding the shield law, she said, "I am a co-sponsor of the Free Flow of Information Act, allowing reporters to protect sources, help ensure that whistleblowers can blow the whistle and [to] keep the public informed and keep officeholders accountable."

Clinton was also the only one of the three presidential candidates who appeared at the Capital Conference to respond to the Sunshine Campaign's survey on open government. "Openness and accountability are not platitudes," she stated.

With any of the candidates, the real challenge is whether campaign promises will hold up once the winner is in the Oval Office, said Debra Hernandez, coordinator of Sunshine Week. How someone will react to First Amendment issues while sitting behind that desk, Hernandez said, is anyone's guess. *