Well then how do you expect to keep your government in line? I’ve lived in countries that don’t extend special rights to the mass media, and it ain’t good. So what is your plan to get around this? Would you rather have police officers who torture suspects? Government officials who take bribes from the mafia? You don’t want to believe that, come live in Japan.
Lots of people in lots of professions are morons. But still you need someone to do the job. Yeah, if they were brighter they could probably do a better job, but so it goes.
I suspect that that’s the reason why we have the current situation where who is or isn’t a journalist is up to “I couldn’t define it, but I can tell you whether someone is or isn’t when I look.”
I think this most closely matches what’s been rattling around in my head. If a coworker tells me that they know someone is stealing from the company, how is that any different from that same coworker telling a reporter or journalist?
There are many professions that have risks associated with them. Truck drivers face traffic accidents. Firefighters head to locations most of us are running out of. Doctors risk lawsuits, no matter what they do. And soldiers, well they are at war. Should contempt of court be seen on a similar level? Is it one of the risks of the job?
It’s essentially the public mouth of the government. I’m not sure of the causes of that though. I can say that they wouldn’t have any extra rights in a court case.
So how, pray tell, do you yourself (aside from exercising your voting rights) hold government accountable? Do you live in Washington DC? Do you read the congressional record? Investigate crimes? Ask newsmakers questions? Travel to conferences? Look up facts and figures directly from the appropriate agencies?
C’mon, I mean it’s one thing to say that you read the papers everyday and feel that some of it is pablum, but to say “I refuse to delegate” implies that you do all the jounalistic legwork in person.
That’s great if you do, but I’ve got a job and a yard that needs mowing.
I agree that there should be no specially protected class of people called ‘reporters’ in the eyes of the law.
There should be protected activities, and anyone - paid journalist, citizen journalist, whoever - should have those protections if engaged in the protected activities.
I honestly don’t have a good idea of what journalistic activities have protection in order to make meaningful the protections of the First Amendment. But if you or I are doing those things, then those protections should apply to us, even if we’re filing our dispatches in a blog that hardly anyone reads.
But let’s take the example from the OP. Here’s a guy who videotaped some vandals. The government wants the tape, he refuses, he’s charged with contempt of court. And rightly so.
What exactly would we gain as a society by shielding this guy from a contempt of court citation? He videotaped an (alleged) crime, his videotape is evidence, he should be required to turn it over.
Is the argument that the vandals only allowed him to videotape their vandalism because they believed he could not be forced to testify about what he saw them do? So what? The videotape is evidence, it can and should be subpoenaed, and no criminal should believe that they can provide evidence of a crime to a journalist without consequence.
Or take the Plame case. Here we have reporters invoking confidentiality of sources…not to protect a government whistleblower, but to protect Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney. Judith Miller was forced to testify, and rightly so. Tim Russert was forced to testify, and rightly so. Robert Novak was forced to testify, and rightly so. Here’s a case where journalistic privelege wouldn’t protect the public, but rather protect the fatcats. Journalistic privelege is not in the public interest, it promotes secrecy rather than transparency. If Scooter Libby doesn’t want to see his words repeated in court, or on the front page of the Washington Post, then he should shut his pie-hole.
Indeed. But as you note, all of those people were forced to testify. At the moment, so far as I am aware, there is no set law that makes someone as a journalist. Everyone does have the same rights as a journalist, so long as they can show that there is not a convincing “substantial relation between the information sought and a subject of overriding and compelling state interest.” I.e. if you can show that the thing you were trying to report is of more compelling interest to the people of the country than the revelation of your source, then you get to keep your source secret.
But simply, it’s going to be more convincing that a professional journalist is hiding information due to the desire to continue reporting socially useful information, rather than for solely personal reasons. That doesn’t cerate a second tier of humanity. It just means they have a better position to argue their case in court.
I don’t remember the court precedent there, but legally I do think there’s a distiction.
Freedom of the press includes everyone, but that’s not really what we’re talking about in this thread. Freedom of the press usually involves matters of prior restraint, which has been the topic of many Supreme Court cases. We’re talking about other protections of the press.
I completely approve of that idea. If not for individuals acting as watchdogs, reporters wouldn’t find out a lot of what they find out. However, that doesn’t mean everybody actually fulfills the functions of a journalist.
I’m a reporter, although for the record I take your contempt as a compliment.
I think an interesting thing to debate is, if you were writing a shield law, who would it apply to, and for what?
In this case, I don’t think a shield law makes sense, because neither the blogger nor the vandals would change anything if there was one. There is no assumption of confidentiality on eiher side that is being violated.
This is a bit different. if a source provides information to a reporter assuming confidentiality, and this is violated, then sources would tend not to reveal things, and this would damage society. The Miller case isn’t a good one, since Libby gave her permission to talk long before she did. Still, how can you judge the motivation of a source? Should only leaks motivated by the purest of reasons be protected? How about someone revealing something important because he’s pissed at his boss? We’d hope that real journalists and editors would judge the motivation for the leak and act accordingly. Remember, Miller’s stuff never got published.
To answer my question, perhaps we could require some previous journalistic activities before someone is covered. Blogging might count. What wouldn’t be covered is someone learning something, and protecting it by suddenly declaring himself a journalist. That might be a good compromise.
That would still allow our approved journalist to arbitrarily decide that everything that he or she learned should be covered by the shield law. See your best friend rob a bank? I’m a journalist, you can’t make me testify.
At minimum is seems that:
The knowledge should have been sought out. The journalist can’t walk past a crime in progress, and decide to withhold the info. It’s not enough to be taping a protest when a riot broke out.
Someone else must have provided the knowledge or at least a tip to it. You have to be protecting an informant, not just hording information.
There must be movement towards publishing. Again, a shield law shouldn’t be used to hide what is learned. If there is no plan to publish based on it, then why are we protecting the journalist. Send the informant to the police and seek immunity.
Even will all safeguards in place, there needs to be a way to override a shield law. If a journalist learns something that would lead to stopping a serious crime, that should override. The story doesn’t trump peoples safety.
Since “freedom of the press” is one of the issues invoked here, it might be apropos to remember what “the press” meant in the minds of the framers. Newspapers in the 1700s:
– were not large, professional operations. “Journalists” did not exist as a identifiable trade. Most newspapers were one-man shows, with one guy doing much if not all of the writing, editing, publishing, and printing. In the large majoity of cases, the newspaper was not a full-time job, but at best a side income (more often a hobby) for a guy who made his real money publishing other stuff.
– were not impartial observers. They were one man’s take on the news, and with all the bias and exaggerations one expects from that.
– were not written strictly as some sort of serious public service. The rigid distinction we now have between the “serious” front section and the “unserious” part with the comics and recipes and whatnot did not exist. The publisher put in whatever he wanted.
Except for physical medium used, “the press” as Madison et al. knew it bore far more resemblance to a modern-day blogger than it did to the New York Times.
I think you’ve laid out a decent groundwork, Tastes of Chocolates. Maybe you saw this, but here is the Branzburg v. Hayes decision, and here’s commentary on the case. The commentary relates to related to Vanessa Leggett, who is mentioned in the OP.
I agree with this in that I don’t think any citizens, be they members of the press or members of the bowling league, should be compelled to turn over information to the government. The need to protect information for national security purposes has mutated into protecting the government’s rear end and that is not a compelling reason to me to put any journalist, or any bowling league member, into jail.
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