Saturday, March 12, 2005

Jeff Jarvis on the California blogger ruling

Mr. Jarvis has an excellent, excellent commentary on BuzzMachine about the ruling a week ago that three bloggers must turn over the names of their informant(s) to Apple. I was making the same point last week, asking "Who is a journalist?"
What if you tomorrow find information about a scandal in government or in industry or in a church... whatever. Now a judge will decide whether that's really news or just the insatiable desire

And once that happens, then a government official can refuse to give you access to a press conference -- at, say the White House -- because you're not really news

One major problem with this entire discussion is that it judges who is a journalist rather than what is a journalistic act. Informing the public is journalism. Period.

1 Comments:

Blogger Perry Eidelbus said...

I was talking with a friend last night about that very thing. I'm not arguing that there's any "speech" protection in what the inside informants did. Apple certainly has the right to learn who violated a non-disclosure clause, and journalists or not, the websites must turn those names over.

However, it's a dangerous precedent because the courts are starting to define who is "the press" and who is not.

Sunday, March 13, 2005 1:52:00 PM  

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