Blogger Freed After 226 Days in Jail For Contempt

frdmfghtr writes "Over at CNN is a report that a blogger has been freed after spending 226 days in jail — a record for a journalist held in contempt. 'Wolf had been found in contempt for refusing to obey a subpoena to turn over his video from a July 2005 protest during the G-8 economic summit where anarchists were suspected of vandalizing a San Francisco police car. One city officer was struck during the rally and his skull was fractured ... California's shield law allows reporters to keep sources and unpublished material secret. But there is no federal shield law protecting reporters from federal investigations. The National Writer's Union, which represents freelance writers, said in a statement that Wolf should never have been jailed. "The abuses visited on Josh and other journalists are part of an effort by governments at all levels to control the volume, flow and content of the information that reaches the public," the union said.'"

Comments

Re:When your news content model consists of merely

[AchiIIe]

> ...pasting other people's ORIGINAL writing, you are not a journalist.

Did you bother reading the article? This guy was not just a blogger who got the latest digg.com headlines and commented on them. He had a camera and went down in the trenches to obtain original footage. Yet he is not registered as a journalist.

But the thing most people here miss -- even if he was a journalist they could still have jailed him. The law protects him from local police investigations, not from Federal investigations. He was easy prey.

On the other hand... WTF dude, a cop was almost killed and you refuse to hand over the tape?

Re:How is this insightful?

[denebian devil]

There were serious suspicions that the government was trying to get this tape as a way of documenting the protesters and possibly flagging them as subversives/terrorists/pariahs-du-jour.

Oh, and the fact that the government was willing to take over the case from California State officials, claiming that the case belonged in Federal jurisdiction because the SF police department receive a little Homeland Security money, shows just how far the government was willing to go to do an end-run around the California shield law.

No, there is no slippery slope.

[porkchop_d_clown]

There is no constitutional right to obstruct an investigation. Quite the reverse. Journalist shields laws are inane precisely because of cases like this.

What is a journalist? In an era when every single one of us "publishes" online, why aren't we all journalists? Given that we are, by any sane definition, all we have to do whenever subpoenaed is assert our right as journalists to keep our information to ourselves just in case we want to publish them.

Even prior to this era, shield laws created a special, unregulated, class of citizen: "The Journalist." Unlike every other type of American, Journalists are permitted to keep secrets without oversight. While the government is supposed to conduct all it's operations in public, while celebrities have no expectation of privacy whatsoever, while intimate details of all of our lives have alway been available to anyone who wandered down to the county courthouse, we have decided that noble Journalists are uniquely trustworthy and do not require any scrutiny of their motives and actions?

Feh.