Bloggers vs. Journalists: back from the grave

David Shaw, media analyst at the Los Angeles Times is last week's champion of professional journalist nepotism. Saying that "Bloggers require no journalistic experience," Shaw declares blogging to be a "solipsistic, self aggrandizing journalistic-wannabe genre," that should not be permitted the same First Amendment rights as professional journalists because "If the courts allow every Tom, Dick and Matt (Drudge) who wants to call himself a journalist to invoke the privilege to protect confidential sources, the public will become even less trusting than it already is of journalists." What seemed to perturb Shaw the most was the fact that bloggers can publish without editors.

Jack Shafer on Slate wrote two blistering responses (here and here) to Shaw's op-ed. Considering blogging to be a form of journalism, Shafer, believing that Shaw attempted to "commandeer the First Amendment for the corporate media," said "The
reporter's privilege should protect acts of journalism as opposed to journalists - professional or otherwise."

On USA Today, Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of North
Carolina, Philip Meyer, who asks "What is a 'journalist?'" opines that "There is neither sound moral nor legal justification for claiming that those who work for major news organizations have stronger First Amendment rights than the
rest of us."

Jeff Jarvis, Buzzmachine media pundit, says "No one owns journalism. It is not an official act, a certified act, an expert act, a proprietary act. Anyone can do journalism. Everyone does. Some do it better than others, of course. But everyone does it."

Arguably the most interesting argument comes from Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment and Director of "The Information Society Project" at Yale Law School, Jack M. Balkin. Towards the beginning of the Apple vs. Bloggers case, Balkin suggested that judges should consider the journalistic qualities of a blog, i.e., does a blogger practice similar methods as journalists such as gathering news and
interviewing sources. However, Balkin notes that the work of bloggers and journalists are beginning to merge and concludes that "In ten years, it may be difficult to tell the two apart. In such a world, it makes little sense to restrict the reporter's privilege to people who work for traditional newsapapers."

Balkin's opinion is echoed in a sense by University of Texas at Austin journalism professor Robert Jensen. In an article about "journalists saving journalism" in the last week's San Antonio Current Jensen is quoted as saying "A lot of what's called indie media is not journalism. Journalism is an attempt by people who are independent of other institutions to understand and explain the world to people."

But isn't that just what bloggers are? Independent of other institutions, trying to understand the world and explain it, at least the way that they see it? Doesn't everyone have the right to investigate, fact-check, report
and give their opinion? Isn't that what an ideal democracy is about? Well, yeah. So, in an ideal democracy where freedom of speech is a sacred right,
everyone from the pseudo-journalist bloggers to those posting their random rants should be protected. But Judge Kleinberg was wise in leaving us all hanging as to the constitutional definition of a blogger's protection. The Apple vs. Bloggers case wasn't directly related to this debate. Rather it concerned trade secrets, something that an ideal democracy also protects.

To find out more about the impact of blogs on journalism, follow April 5th's "Blogs and the Media Debate" at Reuter's in New York summarized here.

Sources: PressThink, Los Angeles Times, Slate (here and here), USA Today, Buzzmachine, Balkinized, San Antonio Current