| | |
|
MahaAtalFirstPaper 17 - 18 May 2009 - Main.MahaAtal
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstPaper" |
|---|
How Do You Protect That Which You Cannot Define
(revised) | | | Yet in an all-press-is-Speech world, definitions like this are, if weakly enforced, easy to abuse, and if too aggressively enforced, bordering on discrimination. If a news blogger—a journalist under this definition—is subpoenaed to testify on a personal friend, it would be possible to claim that all their previous conversations were just journalistic interviews for a hypothetical blog post. Or, citizen-activists (who don’t qualify under this definition) could push to have courts rule on the law’s constitutionality by arguing that giving special rights to any sub-group of Speech-makers is an abridgment of the rights of the rest. | |
<
< | In law or medicine, where client confidentiality is commonplace, these problems don’t arise because exams make perfectly clear who is a lawyer or a doctor. Journalism is not a profession in this sense, but a craft, built on the practices of reporting. Given that those practices deliver information that both tech evangelists and old media dinosaurs acknowledges has civic and social value, preserving the structures that facilitate it—the ability to assure sources of their privacy, the ability to gain access to government officials, the protection from libel—matters. Yet now that the First Amendment and technological divides no longer delineate who gets those privileges, statutory protections runs into their own constitutional barriers. | >
> | In law or medicine, where client confidentiality is commonplace, these problems don’t arise because exams make perfectly clear who is a lawyer or a doctor. Journalism is not a profession in this sense, but a craft, built on the practices of reporting. Given that those practices deliver information that both tech evangelists and old media dinosaurs acknowledges has civic and social value, preserving the structures that facilitate it—the ability to assure sources of their privacy, the ability to gain access to government officials, the protection from libel—matters. Yet now that the First Amendment and technological divides no longer delineate who gets those privileges, statutory protections run into their own constitutional barriers. | | | Circumventing these requires journalists to agree on a system of professional accreditation akin to other fields, but this will limit access to the profession. The question that reporters and citizens face is whether we would prefer a press that is wide but vulnerable, or narrow but vigorous. Unless the press can be defined, it cannot be protected. |
|
| Revision 17 | r17 - 18 May 2009 - 15:18:44 - MahaAtal |
| Revision 16 | r16 - 18 May 2009 - 02:53:38 - MahaAtal |
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |