The question has been posed to me several times over the past year: are bloggers journalists? My reply has always been: there’s no answer to that question. But I soon won’t be able to say that given the legal and legislative moves afoot that could lay down a bright line between the two sets of scribes.
U.S. Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) has sponsored a bill, The Free Flow of Information Act of 2005, that could distinguish between bloggers and journalists, granting the latter greater legal protection under a new federal shield law. According to Lugar, who introduced the draft legislation following the jailing of New York Times reporter Judith Miller, bloggers “would probably not” be covered by the law.
This simple distinction has alarmed many First Amendment activists because it could pave the path toward the licensing of journalists, a nasty practice found in other countries. Dan Gillmor puts it nicely:
We’re moving toward a system under which only the folks who are deemed to be professionals will be granted the status of journalists, and thereby more rights than the rest of us. This is pernicious in every way.
Dan also has a better solution to the problem of divining between journalists and bloggers, if indeed there is such a problem:
Plainly, what’s at issue — if protection is needed — is the act of journalism, not whether the person doing it is a journalist. We can all do acts of journalism from time to time. Most of us are not journalists except at those times. Congress is clueless, perhaps by design, on this issue.
In a bit of synchronicity, the Delaware Supreme Court last week managed to both protect the anonymity of online bloggers while at the same time dissing the new form of digital journalism. The court protected the anonymity of a blogger known as “Proud Citizen” in a defamation suit brought by a city councilman in Smyrna, Delware.
Yet, in making its decision, the court said:
[C]ertain factual and contextual issues relevant to chat rooms and blogs are particularly important in analyzing the defamation claim itself… chat rooms and blogs are generally not as reliable as the Wall Street Journal Online. Blogs and chat rooms tend to be vehicles for the expression of opinions; by their nature, they are not a source of facts or data upon which a reasonable person would rely.
Wendy Seltzer at Copyfight said that bloggers should not be offended by the court’s put-down.
I anticipate some bloggers will object to this characterization: Blogs can be just as important for the dissemination of facts as newspaper sites; newspapers can be wrong. This is of course true. The Cahill decision is not denigrating blogs and chatrooms — they are entitled to First Amendment protections as strong as those of a newspaper — but rather recognizing the discernment ability of their readers.
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:22 AM|Comments(0)
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