Thursday - December 08, 2011

Oh Yeah? Says You!

A federal judge in Oregon has ruled that a Montana woman sued for defamation was not a journalist when she posted online that an Oregon lawyer acted criminally during a bankruptcy case, a decision with implications for bloggers around the country.

Crystal L. Cox, a blogger from Eureka, Mont., was sued for defamation by attorney Kevin Padrick when she posted online that he was a thug and a thief during the handling of bankruptcy proceedings by him and Obsidian Finance Group LLC.

U.S. District Judge Marco Hernandez found last week that as a blogger, Cox was not a journalist and cannot claim the protections afforded to mainstream reporters and news outlets.

The judge ruled that Cox was not protected by Oregon’s shield law from having to produce sources, saying even though Cox defines herself as media, she was not affiliated with any mainstream outlet. He added that the shield law does not apply to civil actions for defamation.

Hernandez said Cox was not a journalist because she offered no professional qualifications as a journalist or legitimate news outlet. She had no journalism education, credentials or affiliation with a recognized news outlet, proof of adhering to journalistic standards such as editing or checking her facts, evidence she produced an independent product or evidence she ever tried to get both sides of the story.

Cox said she considered herself a journalist, producing more than 400 blogs over the past five years, with a proprietary technique to get her postings on the top of search engines where they get the most notice.

Blow it out your ass, blackrobe. The only thing that defines a journalist is that he or she keeps a journal; some kind of note taking with added writing done on a fairly regular basis. Belonging to Big Media is not part of the definition, nor is having a degree in the subject. Anyone can write, given even the most basic level of teaching that government education provides. Receiving payment for your work is not a factor either.

I think the smarter move would be to take a closer look at the so-called shield laws. IMO, journalists should have no greater protection against libel or hearsay than anyone else, though the contrapositive of that is that we are all journalists as needs be. No rule says that keeping a journal must be a lifetime endeavor; two entries is enough, right? Given the ability of an online video, post, picture, or expression to “go viral”, you can’t argue about dissemination bandwidth being a necessary aspect either: sure, the NYT may sell 3 million papers a day (AS IF), but a hot post can garner 20 million hits in a week or more.
So is a person who puts up 2 Tweets thus a journalist? Why not?

On the third hand, if shield laws extend to everyone, which seems fair to me in our classless equality society, then the libel laws are going to take a one way trip to the outhouse. So what differentiates a journalist from a propagandist? [Nothing if they work for MSNBC or CBS, right?] I can’t say; AFAIK there is no hurdle, no standard, that says what you put out there has to be at least 50.00001% provably true. If there was, the UK’s Guardian would be out of business overnight!

Sure, Old Media, the MSM, would LOVE to have such a ruling stick. It would eliminate the competition that is killing them. Well, it would at least give them a hammer to wield; smart people would still get their news and read opposing opinions on topics online.

[plaintiff] Padrick said the case showed how vulnerable anyone was to someone with a computer. He said he has lost business from potential clients who search his name and firm through Google and find Cox’s postings at the top of the list, adding that he has no way to remove them.

“If anyone can self-proclaim themselves to be media, the concept of media is rendered worthless,” Padrick said. “When everyone is media, the concept of media is gone.”

...

Kyu Ho Youm, a First Amendment expert and journalism professor at the University of Oregon, called the judge’s strict definition of a journalist “outdated” since so-called citizen journalists currently outnumber traditional journalists.

“When we talk about the shield law, we should pay more attention to the function people are doing than whether people are connected to traditional and established news media,” he said.

Hey, how about that? I figured out and wrote about both sides of the issue without even reading that part of the article until afterwards. Gosh, wouldn’t having the conceptual awareness of the underlying issues and the ability to analyze them make me more of a professional journalist?  I think so!

I think both Padrick AND Youm are correct together: there is actually no such thing as a journalist any longer, because we all are, or easily can be, journalists. Therefore either there should be no shield laws (a lessening of freedom) or universal shield law (an enlarging of freedom). In general, the only SCOTUS decisions I’m in favor of are the ones that expand the rights of the individual.

On the fourth hand, an apt vector for the fourth estate, perhaps op-eds should have sub sago (under the blanket) protection. It’s an opinion after all, right? And everyone has at least one of those. Would “journalists” have to label such writing with the proper categorical tag to be protected? From a technical perspective, would we have to create and use a new XHTML tag to do such identification it for us, like [op-ed]Obama is a sissy-boy lying Kenyan Communist[/op-ed]? Or could we modern digital journalists get away with assuming that our readers were intelligent enough to be able to tell reporting from opinion? [sarcasm]As if.[/sarcasm]

Posted by Drew458     on 12/08/2011 at 08:09 AM   
Filed Under: • Blog Stuff • Computers and Cyberspace • Media-Bias •  
• Comments (3) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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