Slashdot Mirror
FEC Rules Bloggers Are Journalists
Dotnaught writes "The Federal Election Commission today issued an advisory opinion that finds the Fired Up network of blogs qualifies for the 'press exemption' to federal campaign finance laws. The press exemption, as defined by Congress, is meant to assure 'the unfettered right of the newspapers, TV networks, and other media to cover and comment on political campaigns.' The full ruling is available at the FEC site. A noteworthy passage: '...an entity otherwise eligible for the press exception would not lose its eligibility merely because of a lack of objectivity...'"
> "...an entity otherwise eligible for the press exception would not lose
:)
> its eligibility merely because of a lack of objectivity..."
Well of course not. Otherwise they would have to close down CBS and Fox News right off the bat. And then come back and get CNN, ABC and NBC the next day. On the third day they would shutter the NY Times, the Washington Post and pull the plug on the EIB Network's sat feed.
Of course by day four folks would show up in Washington with their 'Sporting Goods' and voice their 'opinion' about Campaign Finance Reform, reminding Congress that in the end the 1st Amendment, along with the rest are ultimately preserved by a willingness to exercise the 2nd Amendment.
Democrat delenda est
Because some people think that there ought to be limits to Free Speech, it is required that government define exactly what types of Free Speech are really free and which ones ought not be so free.
McCain/Feingold campaign finance laws, which limit the Freedom of Speech of anyone with a political opinion, forces us to define what types of speech should remain legal.
It's sad and disappointing.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Too bad it wasn't the FCC and was the FEC.
-Grant
|grant.henninger.name|
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
Freedom of speech applies to political speech. Campaign finance laws are blatantly unconstitutional. This ruling is offensive because it implies that only established and recognized "press" entities qualify -- and the government, whose interest is markedly not neutral, gets to decide who is and isn't "press".
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
This development is indeed encouraging; however, the need to define free speech explicitly through enumeration is troublesome. As it was intended, free speech should be free speech as long as it does not infringe upon the rights of others. That may seem too nebulous a definition, but it's really quite cut and dry: say what you will so long as it does not deleteriously impact others. Why has such a simple and powerful idea become so diluted?
I think the people trying to "censor" blogs do have a legitimate point: you can bet that everyone who is campaigning for something will set up blogs, pretending to be independant, that sing their praises. That's harder to do with "real" publications because they cost money to set up and run, and their ownership is public record.
I guess this is just part of the price of free speech. I do wonder if there's a good interface for "moderating" blogs, so that, for example, if one is sponsored by Candidate X in a sneaky way, and someone finds out, it can appear beside the name of the blog.
I'd also like to point out a fundamental difference between bloggers and journalists. I have worked at a newspaper, and spent all day calling people, attending government meetings, doing research and asking more questions before I wrote something. Bloggers tend to link to the work of real reporters, then offer comments, or worse, just repeat rumors as fact. At best, they are information scavengers, feeding on the facts hunted down by others.
Because a newspaper has advertisers and subscribers, it has to protect its reputation as being truthful. A blogger has nothing at stake. A newspaper also expects to get sued and tries to have a "truth defense" ready - to cover their butts by being accurate. They might not always succeed, but they have reason to try. I don't know whether any bloggers have been sued for libel yet, but I bet some will be. If you're going to "publish" something, you really do need to check your facts, and that usually takes more time than a hobbyist has.
> At least you started with Fox News...fair and balanced my ass.
Of course they aren't balanced. Which, in a sort of paradox, makes them balanced since they now singlehandendly counterbalance the 'progressive' biases of the rest of the nets. Sort of a TV version of Limbaugh's infamous "I don't need equal time, I am equal time!".
Personally I don't mind bias all that much as long as it is in the open and Fox does often admit that while they make an effort to present both sides, they do come at issues with a conservative viewpoint. Neither Bill O'Reilly or Maureen Dowd bother me since both are pretty open about their position advocacy. What pisses me off is when asshats like Dan Rather or Helen Thomas claim with a straight face to be impartial in their reporting when they are as biased as Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken.
Or take the Sunday morning yak yak shows. I don't get Face the Nation over my local CBS station, but both NBC's Meet the Press and ABC's This Week program are hosted by former Democratic Party aparatchiks with no major experience in journalism prior to taking the helm at their respective high prestige posts? Harmless Coincidence? We are supposed to believe both are presenting a 'balanced' view of politics?
Democrat delenda est
The Washington Post has a bias toward the right? I'm not sure I can agree with that. I consider myself pretty allergic to any strong conservative bias; few things pain me more than sitting through the O'Reilly Factor. I've never considered the Washington Post to have any such bias. If they do, it's either too clever or too weak for me to pick up on.
I would also argue that simply tallying up "left versus right" bias is useless with regards to determining the state of our mass media. By its very nature, political bias is anything but a black-and-white issue.
I'm curious, how come you can be so obsessed by a private group deciding to pull something like that becuase of private reaction, but be (apparently) perfectly O.K. with the fact that the FEC can tell you what you can say?
It's time to quit the petty left/right bullshit. We have more important matters to deal with, like simple freedoms we used to have. Let's deal with those important issues, then get back to our petty bickering.
Thanks.
A modern day witchhunt.
I'm a conservative and I would agree with the original poster, that the Washington Post is biased to the right. It's not nearly as much as Fox News, but it's definitely there. The Wall Street Journal also slants to the right to some extent. I can't listen to Fox News any more than I can listen to CBS... the slant is just too much. Obvious bias in either direction is annoying.
However, I can read the Washington Post and WSJ without any problem. Same for our local ABC affiliate.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
I'd much rather deal with 'blog who make no pretense. I'll do my own fact checking rather than rely on unseen gnomes to do it to my satisfaction.
As any GPL fan will tell you, it isn't about "freedom to", it is about "freedom from".
"Freedom of speech", to my ears, sounds a lot more like "freedom TO speak" than "freedom FROM speaking", or even than "freedom FROM other people's speaking."
Likewise, "freedom of the press" would seem to be a lot closer in my mind to "freedom TO run a press" then "freedom FROM those running the press".
And given the (admittedly imperfect) freedom of opportunity in the U.S. (that's a freedom TO opportunity, not a freedom FROM opportunity), if you want to buy bigger ads than the opponent, then you are free to earn/beg/raise enough money to do so.
Of course, if we did away with the artificially-created entities known as "corporations", and realized again that only individual citizens, not mythical on-paper aggregations of them, have rights, that would go a long way toward equalizing that freedom of opportunity, and would make a lot of the campaign finance laws unnecessary in the first place. But that's a whole nother kettle of fish.
Furthermore, politicians should have their advertising budgets capped and paid for by the government.
Speaking as a libertarian, I agree. Every single candidate, regardless of party affiliation, experience, competence, degree of insanity, or number of tinfoil hats, should be eligible to fill out a form and get a check (the exact same amount for every one of 'em) covering all possible campaign expenses. And the money to fund this should come out of the pockets of every person who ever spoke in favor of campaign finance reform in any way. Let them put their money where their mouths are.
Me, I'll continue giving my (very limited) political donations to the candidates I support, and keep insisting that it's my absolute right to do so.
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
In fact, free speech doesn't really apply to journalists. I'm speaking as someone who has worked in journalism for the past ten years. Let's say I hate Microsoft. As a journalist, if I wrote something like "Microsoft is crap and I'm not just saying that because Bill Gates likes to sleep with young boys and small furry animals" I would be in a load of trouble. Sure, it's an obvious joke, but Gates would have me dragged into court in less time than it took Windows98 to flash a BSOD. Now I could argue satire, but unless I got lucky and had a jury full of Mac addicts, I would probably lose.
The example doesn't even need to be that extreme. News organizations have been sued for defamatory stories about corporations, even though everything in their story was accurate. Once upon a time, journalists could rely on the truth as their defense. This is not always the case anymore. You can be sued for defamation even if the facts are on your side, and you will lose if the jury sides against you.
The only so-called journalists who come close to getting away with things like that are tabloids, and they're being sued left and right. They're losing, too.
Add to that the fact that most bloggers aren't affiliated with big corporations or other entities with loads of cash. Most of them are regular people, who couldn't afford to defend themselves in court even if they were 100% accurate with everything they wrote.
Of course, I haven't talked about political speech, which IS what this ruling is all about. However, if the government really starts treating blogs like other journalistic media, it will have to apply the same standards to all of them. At the very least, blogs could eventually be vulnerable to the same legal actions as traditional media.
I guess what worries me the most is this: As a journalist, I am not at all free to say whatever it is I want to say--nor should I be. Some stories are so heavily "lawyered" to avoid lawsuits, they read like a Microsoft EULA. Most of us couldn't afford to have a legal team on retainer to protect ourselves. Even if we could, what kind of "freedom" is that?
This is about money.
This is about money that the parties and candidates spend paying "bloggers" to write about how good they are.
The issue here is not free speach. It has been spun. The issue here is if someone is being paid to write something in a blog, then they should have to make that clear on the blog. There is a difference between an opinion piece and propaganda.
If 500 people all write in support of an issue and it turns out that they have been paid to all support that issue, it isn't really a grass roots support movement, is it?
This boils back down to the same issue as the gov. paying "journalists" to create fake news reports about certain issues.
I have no problem with parties and candidates paying people to write good things about them, I just want to know if what I am reading is someone's opinion or a campaign ad.
Yestrday I could not spell jurnalist, now I are one!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Why are you calling a "Draft Advisory Opinion" by a commission a "ruling"?
Effectively, libel is dead. If you, as a journalist, publish mean, false things about Bill Gates, a public figure, then you can only be found guilty of libel if it can be proved that you acted with 'actual malice'. See Sullivan v New York Times (1964). Historically, malice has been almost impossible to prove, and people have lost libel cases against parties who were proven to have published falsehoods against them, who were proven to have KNOWN those falshoods were false prior to publication, but by whom malice could not be proven. You are worrying for nothing, you can basically make any statements you would like about a public figure with impunity.
My number one news source, however, is the News Hour. I don't watch network TV news: CNN is filth, CBS, NBC, and ABC are fluff (even if everyone says they're left leaning, I don't care, they lost THIS liberal), and FOX is made up of a bunch of neoconservative lobbiests—seriously, half of their stuff is made up of former conservative political advisors... Yes, I'm looking at you, Bill Kristol! The News Hour, and the other PBS news shows (Washington Week, Now, and Charlie Rose) feel like the only TV news that doesn't talk to me like I'm in 6th grade, and doesn't try to compress complicated events into 1 minute soundbytes. And when I watch news, I don't need to be entertained. I'm honestly excited and interested in learning about events at hand. Tell it to me straight. PBS is the only one that really does this anymore, the rest is just entertainment.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
I almost completely agree-- and I'm a conservative. I'd add that journalists are primarily concerned with communication and presentation. It takes artistry to produce a coherent report. They're not operational people by nature. Artists tend to be liberal.
In an ideal, black body radiation sort of way, it's impossible to find a reporter who is completely without bias. And you wouldn't want to read him if you found him. Ultimately, journalism is partly about reporting and partly about synthesizing and interpreting events. And events have many interpretations.
Good journalists are fair-minded. They're more concerned with what is true than who is right. They aren't in there to change your mind, just to let you in on what's happening in the world. They'll have a bias, but they know it, acknowledge it, and work extra hard to ensure that their coverage isn't tainted by it.
Bad journalists follow the creed of Cargo Cult Science. That is: "I already know what's true, now let me go prove it." They may be right sometimes, but their process is tainted and you won't know when they're right. And, really, they don't either. They're in journalism because they want to change the world, and protect people from evil bad guys who tell lies. There are bad conservative journalists, and bad liberal ones, but until the rise of Fox, most journalists were liberal, so most bad ones were too.
It's no accident that journalism scandals came up right as blogs were getting big. A rise of a massive citizen journalism, biased individually but usually not collectively, suddenly put the news empires on the spot. Liberals insist that blogs are primarily a liberal movement, and conservatives claim that it's mostly conservative. The truth is that you read the blogs you agree with, so you feel like your side is huge. We don't really know where the overall centroid is.
Incidentally, I think that programmers are both artists and engineers-- which I think is why programmers still don't fall easily into a political category, even though we are all definitely on the same wave lengths... even when we disagree.