Technically the stations all have charters that can be revoked if they’re not serving the public.
Sorry, the thought of that ever happening made me laugh. Anyway, even though they are subscription-based, newspapers and magazine are still responsible for libelous statements. I don’t know that blogs are. That probably has not been defined yet.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that the bloggers do not have an agreement with Apple. Rather, Apple is attempting to force the bloggers to help Apple find out which of their employees violated their NDA. What these employees are alleged to have committed is a tort, not a crime. In any case, the bloggers are not subject to prosecution, but only to court order (and possibly to penalties for comtempt of court).
The problem with the blogs as journalism is that anyone with a computer, internet connection, and some free time, can have one. They have no editors, no fact checkers, no proof readers, and really no standards. When they want to go through the same processes as a normal reporter, then they can have any - and it sounds like there aren’t a whole lot of them - protections afforded by law.
And to claim that because you think the media is shifty, then bloggers count as journalists, is silly.
If bloggers were held to the same standards as journalists, what would that mean for those who lie and slander others? Would they be liable to harsher penalties because they are considered journalists? How would the person who had been slandered go about prosecuting said “journalist”?
Why wouldn’t a blogger be responsible for libelous statements? Libel is libel. Admittedly IANAL but I would be shocked to find that there is a libel law for established news media and another for Joe Blow scribbling things on a paper and gluing it to a street light.
The difference is it is probably likely the blogger is not worth suing. Going after an established media outlet you have deeper pockets to tap into to recover damages if libel is proved. Of what use suing some person with $2,000 in savings if it costs you $50,000 to litigate the case? As near as I can tell such people generally get a nasty-gram from an attorney threatening legal action if they do not remove whatever it is they deem offensive. The blogger can then decide to pay an attorney to fight back or remove the bad bits. If the blogger only has $2,000 it isn’t hard to bet on what they will probably decide to do.
So, it is for the above reasons that a media outlet has editors and fact checkers and written standards to avoid trouble. First, they can afford it and second they stand to lose more if they mess up. Presumably a media source also cares about their reputation and (generally but perhaps not always) give the appearance of impartiality. A blogger has less at stake and while some may care about their rep it is easier to see how many may not be so scrupulous.
FWIW it is my impression libel is pretty hard to prove. Again, IANAL but in the past have spoken to my dad about it (and he is a lawyer). He told me it is the difficulty of proving libel that allows rags like The National Enquirer to do what they do. Yes, they have been successfully sued for libel but they win far more often than they lose those cases. IIRC it is not enough to just print something false. You have to know it is false when you print it OR show a callous disregard for the truth. Apparently this is a pretty difficult thing to prove in court. That said it’d be good if a real lawyer who knows better chimes in on this point…things may have changed since I talked to my dad about it 10-15 years ago.
Anyone can be sued for defamation, journalist or private citizen. Journalists are more in a position to have their work disseminated to a greater number of citizens, and to be in a higher position of trust, and therefore, more likely to be sued.
Robin
Sorry, I was working on a project and didn’t see this part of your post.
Part of the reason newspapers like the Enquirer get away with it is because much of they print is true, or at least the germ of it is true, but because of the way the story is framed, the truth is distorted, and the facts thus are used to support something entirely different.
I’ll give you an example.
Last year, one of the tabloids published a story on Kobe Bryant’s accuser in which a friend quoted her as saying that she wanted to sleep with a star and get a lot of money for it. That formed the basis for the story. What was glossed over was the fact that his accuser said that when she was a teenager, years before the alleged assault. Whether she still feels that way, or whether that was in the back of her mind that night is irrelevant. She said what she said, and that makes the story “true” from a legal perspective.
IANAL, but this is covered in several of my journalism courses.
Robin
Because I don’t think there’s any precedent yet. Do you see what I mean?
Yes, it is. The rest of your post is pretty close to correct. There’s an extra hurdle for public figures called “actual malice,” which means they have to prove exactly that. And yeah, it’s very hard to show what someone else’s motivations were for printing or writing something.
Also, the standard for libel against public figures is higher than that for libel against Joe Blow. Tabloid journalists are, obviously, concerned only with the former.
Yutzes with printing presses don’t have any regs to follow regarding what they print. First Amendment, and all that.
But that’s exactly the situation everyday reporters are in: they don’t face retribution, they want a scoop, and if they don’t protect their sources, the next confidential source won’t talk to them.
Do you read op-ed columns? Do you watch Hannity or O’Reilly? They have no editors and no fact checkers, either, AFAICT. The op-ed writers probably do have proofreaders, but the established ones (which is most of them; they seem to have lifetime tenure) don’t seem to have to have anyone review their columns.
The only difference between Broder and Will, and Atrios and Instapundit, is that Broder and Will keep other voices off the limited space of the op-ed page simply by continuing to be there. But there’s an infinitude of Internet for new bloggers. Bloggers have broken the monopoly; they’ve demonstrated that there are a lot of writers out there who are far better suited for being in the commentariat than the op-ed writers and Sunday gasbags who thought they were the privileged few that everyone had to listen to. I’d rather read Kevin Drum than any op-ed writer I’ve ever read except for maybe Krugman, and Kevin’s not even my favorite blogger; that would be Brad DeLong.
They shouldn’t be, except to the extent that the blog has a reputation for accuracy.
FWIW, very few blogs do original reporting; accordingly, when one is citing facts one sees in a blog, the proper form is to cite the source the blog cited - after checking it to make sure it really said what the blogger said it did.
Here’s the problem: I can identify what reporters do, pretty well: they go out, interview people, dig through records, and publish the results.
But I can’t recognize a difference between what those journalists do who are really part of the commentariat (rather than reporters), and what political radio show hosts (e.g. Limbaugh) do, or what bloggers do.
And even with reporters - now that so many public records that used to involve rummaging through courthouse files to access are now online, anyone can do the ‘looking through records’ part. We posters do it all the time here - digging through the President’s budget, or Bureau of Labor Statistics records, or the Social Security Trustees’ report, or whatever. The only difference between posters/bloggers and reporters, is that reporters for actual newspapers and broadcast outlets have a much better chance of getting their calls returned, if their story depends on a response from a government or corporate official.
There’s still a difference there - I’m more than willing to admit that Dana Milbank of the WaPo is a reporter in ways that I never will be. But it’s a diminishing difference, and may not continue indefinitely. And in the case of the commentariat, there’s no difference at all. Atrios is just as qualified as David Broder, and twenty times as interesting. And the same goes for Instapundit and George Will.
What accountability is that? None other than the libel laws, which apply to everyone.
And while newspapers have deep pockets (hence are more tempting targets), they also have deep pockets (which means they can hire good lawyers). Ever heard of SLAPPs, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation?
RTFirefly, how much journalist style protection does Bill O’Reilly enjoy? How about Hannity and Colmes? When did op-ed columnists become become reporters?
Who said they were reporters? I used the broader term journalists which does, AFAICT, encompass them.
I don’t know whether O’Reilly’s or Hannity’s “journalist style protection” has ever been measured. But the question is, does the fact that they’re on TV somehow entitle them to more protection than bloggers get, given that they’re less responsible than a lot of bloggers I know of? I can’t see that it would.
And why hasn’t Bob Novak been publicly subpoenaed about the Valerie Plame leak? He’s an op-ed columnist, and only marginally a reporter. But he’s getting the kid-glove treatment as if he’s entitled to some sort of special handling to protect his sources.
So the argument is now “Well, the waters already muddy. Why not throw some more crap in there?”
Just because the line between journalist and editorialist is smeared all to hell and back doesn’t mean we should make it any worse.
Here’s a thought that occurred to me. When a journalist slanders a person, the company that “publishes” the journalist can also be sued for defamation. So, if Bloggers are considered journalists, does this mean the blog host site can be sued for defamation? If that’s the case, there will be plenty of blog sites closing down after the trend of suing bloggers and their hosts as though they were journalists begins.
In general I’d say no, the hosting site cannot be sued for defamation any more than you could sue Dell for building the computer the guy used or Microsoft for providing the software the blogger used.
That said I seem to recall a case awhile back where a New York investment firm sued an ISP for defamatory remarks someone (not the ISP) made about the investment firm. In this case, though, the ISP had a policy of “watching” what was written via its service. Their reason was an attempt to be a “good corporate citizen” and stop illegal things like kiddie porn passing through their system. Because they had taken some responsibility for this that opened them up to a lawsuit from the investment firm. Needless to say all ISPs now do not watch what goes through their system anymore than the phone company listens to your phone calls so they can wash their hands of what happens on there.
Here’s a better answer to your question…