Watched and enjoyed tonight’s “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” with coverage of the ongoing controversy over whether the press deserves a special privilege to protect confidential sources (yes, it does) and under what circumstances (not in every case). Here’s a transcript of the segment.
Great to see Jeff Jarvis in fine form as a self-described blogger and citizen journalist. Here’s his writeup on Buzzmachine about his appearance. And here’s his related column in the Guardian UK about the changing nature of secrets online.
From time to time, Jeff has expressed ambivalence about confidentiality and whether press privileges should extend to bloggers. He repeated that ambivalence tonight, saying that he didn’t know if everyone engaging in journalism should be covered (smartly, he talked about the act of journalism, not who should be deemed a journalist). If the right extends to all of us (people like Tony Soprano, he said), then it extends to none of us.
Well, no.
As I wrote on Jeff’s blog, the First Amendment applies to all of us, miscreants included.
And press protections should apply to anyone who is practicing journalism, miscreant Tony Soprano bloggers included.
As I said last week in Santa Barbara, I think access looms as a potentially larger issue than shield laws about confidential sources. When a news event happens, will only sanctioned journalists from the mainstream media be allowed access to the scene or access to official sources of information? Or will we begin tearing down that artificial wall?
Let’s connect the dots and follow it to its logical conclusion: Citizens engaging in random acts of journalism deserve the same protections under the law as mainstream media journalists.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
J.D.: And as I responded over there… Right. I went for the joke with Soprano and that obscured the point: If the shield can apply to anyone, the fear is that the miscreants ruin it for everyone, as our teachers used to say. Or as the attorneys say: when everyone has the privilege, it isn’t a privilege. So then they will have to limit the shield in some other way and that, too, is difficult.
When a news event happens, and the public has access to that event, you can’t make a distinction between public and media access. In other words, any blogger or citizen reporter has as much of a right to record news events as CNN.
The sticky wicket has to do with news events that are not public by nature. Should a citizen reporter be allowed to cross police lines to interview detectives investigating a murder? Are bloggers entitled to First Amendment rights and Shield Law protection?
I agree that it is the act of journalism itself that matters most and that must be protected, regardless of “who” is the journalist being granted access or protection. I could care less who is doing the reporting, I only care about the quality of the news being reported. In other words, I don’t abhor Geraldo because of who he is; I abhor him because he isn’t any good at his job.