Is a blogger a real journalist and does it make any difference?
All of you within the sound of this keyboard should care because that definition could have fundamental effects on the flow of information. And how you conduct this part of your techno lives.
A Cook County judge has landed in the middle of that unanswered question by ruling a California technology blogger is not a real journalist and cannot claim the protection of the California and Illinois shield laws about his sources.
The judged seems to cast this as a tough judgment call because there are valid arguments on both sides. But the truth is this is the easiest case of its kind. If the blog in question is not journalism, then there are virtually no definitions that will cover what we all do.
TechnoBuffalo, a three-year-old gadget blog, claims a million readers a month. It has employees, editors, employees and all the infrastructure trappings that media companies usually possess.
It published images in August taken from the user’s guide for the Droid Bionic before the phone went on sale. A presumed insider spilled the beans, and Motorola’s printer in Niles, Ill., was not happy.
So they sued, demanding to know the source of the leak. But the blog has so far kept the tipster secret, arguing that it was publishing news and so is protected under the journalist shield laws.
Is it protected?
We’d like to know that ourselves. But the issue remains unsettled as both a cultural and legal matter. At some point, state legislatures or a high appeals court will have to define the rules.
But until then, we denizens of the murky Internet realms will continue crashing into old rules that seem obsolete.
Here’s how most shield laws work and why. To guarantee traditional press outlets – perhaps even Internet websites – can function, the shield law says they don’t have reveal a source of sensitive information.
Without the protection, most tipsters and sources would never reveal embarrassing secrets that history now suggests should have been public knowledge.
Think of the Pentagon Papers or Watergate, for example.
No law stops any blogger from blogging with facts, opinions or totally made-up nonsense.
No one is protected from being sued for libel.
But the law does protect the “newsman” (what an old-timey word) from being told to divulge who passed the secret.
It’s the first constituent element of press freedom guaranteed in the Constitution that has real effect on the business of information.
The hidden argument surrounds credibility. The Internet still is populated by a seething goulash of truth seekers, amateurs and some outright slugs devoid of much credibility. Just like “real” journalism. Do ruthless, tasteless, despicable people deserve the same rights as the rest of us noble people?
I guess so. Darn it. Otherwise it’s not an enunciated right. It’s just a good deal we’ve all lucked into.
The Constitution generally sides with the flow of information over keeping secrets. Without protection, whistleblowers always get fired, and worse. Too many secrets make for a closed society.
Judge Michael Panter insists that TechnoBuffalo isn’t a real news operation. Is it? Seems to fit the “quacks like a duck” theory of existential realism. But the judge seems baffled by what the rest of the world might see as obvious.
The real problem, of course, is that the “old society” doesn’t know how to frame the virtual world in other than brick-and-mortar definitions. It’s always the rumble seat paradigms that tend to thwart the future, not out of malice. Just ignorance.
It’s what stopped the Swiss from realizing that a digital watch was a real watch, just as much real as the gear and lever clocks they built.
The Swiss owned the invention of digital timekeeping and gave it away for virtually nothing to the Japanese because they could not fathom how a silent, electronic, numerical shape-shifter could be seen as a real watch.
What’s a bad paradigm worth? About four nickels, baby.
The world we leave behind an inch of reality at a time is the world that thrives on solid definitions far less than it does reality of the moment.
We are controlled by the old world. Still.
As for legal specifics, until the issue of defining bloggers can be resolved, the First Amendment has hit a speed bump in Illinois.
