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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.'"
What does American law have to do with Wikileaks?
No sig today...
A sports reporter tweeted on Monday (this week or last week, i'm getting this second hand) that a ballplayer's suspension would be 5 games instead of 4.
Numerous outlets picked it up and ran it as news.
Thing is, he made it up. Deliberately. To demonstrate how many news outlets do zero confirmatory investigation before running stories.
So what did his employer do?
Fired him.
I.e., it's going to get worse before it gets better.
A lot longer than that, if you believe/read Chomsky. Challenging the wrong people is a career damaging move.
There's a difference between saying that you only get the protection if you're somehow accredited (whether it be by the government or by a separate, professional body) and saying you can or cannot publish stories at all. (As with free speech, you can publish what you want, but you may face consequences for publishing things, like libelous or classified material.)
In the end, this would be a new protection that the constitution doesn't appear to already grant journalists, so it's hard to see that not extending it to everyone is necessarily unconstitutional.
I don't condemn Drudge at all! I congratulate him for putting "real" journalist's feet to the fire like Jon Stewart (oh the irony).
My point is: how exactly is he different than Wikileaks? That's my point! He was famous for headlining the Monica Lewinsky scandal -- exposing abuse at the expense of the American interest. He's as much a journalist as anything Wikileaks exposes! Likewise, my hope is that Wikileaks will become a prime bookmark (maybe not homepage) for journalists in the future but the QUANTITY of novel information they have provided is unprecedented. But the "real" journalists still use these antiquated guys as critical tools for their "journalism" to lead their stories. Not much of an investigative journalism budget for MSM now-a-days.
Again, non-wire, original journalism is NOT in the MSM. I think we can both agree on that, no matter what your views are (unless your the head of CNN/Fox/MSNBC)...
Really, I think everyone in the US can agree that the MSM is shit and we need to finance independment (non-corporate) media. I know the tea parties have my back on that. Liberals would probably agree on that as well!. They would just have to STRICTLY restrict corporate financing.
What would the world be like then?!
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
While this is certainly true, that list is more a matter of meeting the broad definition of religion and being non-profit rather than having to meet a focused set of criteria. For instance, there are many secular institutions on that list of 'approved churches'. This is only possible because there isn't a focused criteria of things like: must worship a god(s), must hold a worship service, etc that one must meet. If, to be a journalist, one only had to meet the definition of journalism (ie. the act of reporting news) then these two cases would be the same.