Bloggers undercut reporters' 1A privilege defense [fs]

Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2005 00:07:37 -0500
From: Declan McCullagh
Sender: politech-bounces@politechbot.com


[I meant to send this out last month. It's provocative and raises
some of the hoary who's-a-journalist-and-can-get-creds issues that
are becoming important again. --Declan]



http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getmailfiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2004/12/06&ID=Ar00600

Bloggers Blur the Definition of Reporters' Privilege

By JOSH GERSTEIN Staff Reporter of the Sun

As two prominent Washington journalists struggle to avoid jail
time over their refusal to disclose confidential sources, one of the
biggest obstacles the reporters face is America's fastgrowing army of
citizen Web loggers, or bloggers.

It's not that the town criers of the online world are campaigning
to send Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of
Time Magazine to prison. Rather, it's the bloggers' very existence
that undercuts the journalists' legal defense.

On Wednesday, lawyers for Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper are scheduled
to appear before a federal appeals court in the capital to argue that
reporters should have a legal privilege not to testify about their
sources under most circumstances. A federal prosecutor investigating
whether the White House leaked the name of a CIA operative,Valerie
Plame, has asked the pair to appear before a grand jury to answer
questions.They have refused.

The crux of the reporters' contention is that the public would be
less well informed if journalists could not promise their sources
confidentiality. However, the proliferation of blogs and bloggers
could represent the Achilles' heel in this approach. If Ms. Miller
and Mr. Cooper are entitled to claim special treatment in the courts,
so too could hundreds of thousands of Americans who use the Internet
to post comments about their views on current events.

[...]

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