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Newspapers Cut Wikileaks Out of Shield Law
An anonymous reader writes "The US press has been pushing for a (much needed) federal shield law, that would allow reporters to protect their sources. It's been something of a political struggle for a few years now, and things were getting close when Wikileaks suddenly got a bunch of attention for leaking all those Afghan war documents. Suddenly, the politicians involved started working on an amendment that would specifically carve out an exception for Wikileaks so that it would not be covered by such a shield law. And, now, The First Amendment Center is condemning the newspaper industry for throwing Wikileaks under the bus, as many in the industry are supporting this new amendment, and saying that Wikileaks doesn't deserve source protection because 'it's not journalism.'"
Welcome the very, very messed up world of journalism law in the early 21st Century. Tech advances, the law plays catch up.
Your reading list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libel_tourism
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/08/26/speech-act-now-a-law-big-win-for-libel-reform/
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_V2BY9JufdkJ:immi.is/%3Fl%3Den%26p%3Dvision+immi.is&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
On what planet? Here on earth journalism has always been about what will sell papers or garner eyeballs.
I mean seriously, the drek quoted above gets posted and moderated 'insightful' every time a story about the media posted - but it is not now and never has been true.
US Politicians incorrectly believe that the US owns the entire internet.
Actually, there is an acknowledged problem that "American interests" (i.e., US-registered corporations) own and operate a large fraction of the world's international cables, and almost all of the intercontinental cables. So it's easy for the US government to think of at least the "Internet backbone" as US property.
The Internet might be a better place if this problem were fixed.
Of course, the corporate world is slowly becoming a truly international culture that is independent of mere governments, so maybe the problem is being fixed. Whether this is an improvement isn't clear.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Drudge became famous (infamous?) after he broke a hard news story that the editors at Newsweek decided to bury out of political favoritism. So while you seem to condemn Drudge for his effect on journalism, he got his break precisely because old media had already abandoned journalism for cronyism.
Sure, he mixes a ton of tabloid "news" in with hard reporting, plus aggregates news from other sources, but we've seen that for decades too.
Drudge is only noteworthy because he showed that a small time nobody can defeat the incestuous world of maintstream reporting, where the cocktail circuit is more important than keeping an eye on the powerful and educating readers. He started the trend of watching the watchers to keep them honest by reporting the things they wanted to bury.
It's true:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20100831/sp_yblog_upshot/washington-post-suspends-columnist-for-twitter-hoax
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
All y'all obviously don't know the history of the news business. Vis. Randolph Hearst, or even more, the famous Tom Paine. The hypothesis of objective reporting has never been, and never will be, fact. ... :)
Except for what I write. That's all objective truth!