Who makes up the press these days? MSM? Bloggers too? And what protections and responsibilities should they have? Lots is at stake here, as the editor of the Columbia Journalist Review calls bloggers who called for release of the Davos tape "the salivating morons who make up the lynch mob". .
The Eason Jordan affair is only one of several earthquakes to hit the news media recently. Now the US Court of Appeals for the DC District has ruled that the NYT and Time magazine must testify about their sources in the Valerie Plume affair. (h/t Instapundit) Howard Bashman over at Legal Affairs notes:
Aside from all the obvious reasons why this decision is noteworthy, it's not every day that a three-judge panel produces a decision consisting of four opinions.
Which tells you how contentious this issue is. Bashman links to some early comments on the decision. UPDATE: Orin Kerr over at Volokh Conspiracy has read the opinion and it mentions bloggers specifically (and now back to my original post here)
Why does this matter? Because one of the things that distinguishes a professional journalist from a blogger, in theory at least, is that the press is given legal privileges and protections not afforded to individual citizens. These privileges, enshrined in a variety of Supreme Court cases, are given to the "Fourth Estate" on the theory that a free and protected press contributes to a more honest and accountable government.
But what if the press itself, or at least current news media, lose credibility in the eyes of the electorate on behalf of whom they supposedly speak? Or have other loyalties than to the wellbeing of the Republic?
Thomas Carlyle traced the origin of the phrase "Fourth Estate" to Edmond Burke:
Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact, .... Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. ..... Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures: the requisite thing is that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite. -– Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero Worship
But that's the issue now, isn't it? On the one hand, all sorts of people besides professional journalists have a tongue which others can listen to, and an electronic printing press too. And on the other hand, the MSM have become, at least in part, more entertainment than a serious member of our governing system.
Eason Jordan is a test case because he was open about the fact that his interests were not necessarily bound up with the health of the US Republic. Here's part of what I wrote over at Jay Rosen's PressThink site:
I do think we need to consider carefully the impact of information on our democracy. If professional journalists are no long the Fourth Estate of society/government - or if they are no longer alone in that role - what should we do about the legal privileges and protections we extend to them? I'm unwilling to discard those lightly and it's not clear to me that they should be extended easily to bloggers - at least not to bloggers as a group under all circumstances.And yet, as Jordan's interview three years ago notes (corrected date - ed), CNNi is not an American company. Expecting him and his company to have loyalty to the American electorate is probably a futile effort -- and that means that we can hold him only to the barest standard of factuality in his comments. Anything beyond that is likely to depend to a good degree on values and those tend to differ from culture to culture.
In other words, assuming Jordan said what people believe he said (and that he meant it, per his comments in Portugal), we shouldn't be surprised. The question is, what are the legal and other implications of delinking the press from a specific country and culture?
That's an issue we've only just begun to wrestle with.
And so "POOF" go the special privleges
They have not only been forein, they have been hostile, adversarial, and part of the opposition apparatus of the enemy.
Almost like Tokyo Rose broadcasting from New York.
Well, that's the question. I'm not so sure the answer is so clear, though.
For one thing, there are conscientious journalists, Jordan notwithstanding.
For another thing, we NEED a functioning, objective press for our system of government to work.
And for another thing, I'm leaving to go to CPAC tomorrow. If I'm in any way being a "citizen journalist" there, it would be nice to believe that at least some privileges might be extended to what I write, too.
But thats not what we have, and the questions that arise here are not of the sort of the SS debate, or the location of new stoplights, but aid/opposition of the success and welfare of our troops and 10s of millions of people that hang in the ballance.
Big difference, if they cant act on that difference, let them move their HQ to france and get the same room allocated on our airwaves.
It requires no special paper, license, or any color of ribbon, any more than the pampheteers of the late 18th century, you become the protected press the instant you do what they do, no matter how small the circulation.
The thought that you require any special blessing from government or anybody to be an actor in one of our institutions is perverse to American principle.
I agree with that last statement, Raymond. But the reality is that I probably could not afford to be sued by someone for something I blog, even if it is likely that the case would eventually be thrown out.
Professional journalists have their corporations behind them - a big difference. One that is shifting, to be sure, but still a big deal - note that it isn't the individual journalists but rather the NY Times and Time magazine themselves who are involved in today's ruling.
I think we can expect to see CNN try to spin off a separate brand with separate editorial staff that's, er, targeted at the arab and european markets.
The US team can tell its US audience one story and the Eur-abian team can tell their audience another story, and whenever the twain meet, as in Davos, handlers will be present to ensure that all messages for the combined audience are swabbed through and through with ambiguity.
But the notion of CNN as some kind of global brand incarnating the disinterested pursuit of global truth is absurd. The only realms in which a media organization can proffer such a product are in sports, business and pornography.
Yes, democracy does indeed require a "functioning, effective press". But we need to change the news story and news presentation format from one that's static and uni-directional to one that better approximates reality, which is dynamic, complex, and characterized by a many-to-many dialectic in which reporters are not merely observers but participants.
Gee, maybe we could use a network allowing many-to-many conversations with robust storage and retrieval capabilities as well as filters that separate fact from opinion....
Naw, better to have centralized, top-down pushes of information via static web pages and uneditable video and audio created a small priesthood for the benighted masses.
I think we can expect to see CNN try to spin off a separate brand with separate editorial staff that's, er, targeted at the arab and european markets.
I still wonder if CNN will bid for Al Jazheera when it comes up for sale later this year.
The job of the press is to be the real opposition of the goverment. It is stops being the press and becomes a propaganda channel as soon as you gleichzalt it for the success and welfare of our troops.
I also find it weird that you would need two different spins for different markets if you are telling the truth but than i don't think the MSM is telling the truth about how a disaster Iraq is for the US.
It is not the job of the press to be an opposition to the government. That is complete nonsense. It is the job of the opposition party to be the opposition.
It is the job of the press to report the news. A completely different animal. I would expect different outlets of the press to report news that is aggregated to serve different profiles of consumers of news.
But the idea that the press is an institutional opposition is false.
The idea that the press' role is to be the opposition to the government is an unfortunate distortion left over from Watergate.
Yep. One perpetuated by "The Press" themselves, too... and it's also why any story that happens to say, "What the Party in power just proposed actually is likely to be as useful as they say it is" is called 'cheerleading' even when it's more factual than an anti-government position.
Robin, you wrote:
I'm having definitional problems with this idea, for two reasons. (1) My own ignorance; that's just me, and (2) Seemingly widespread ignorance and vagueness as to what those privileges and protections actually are.
For example, Beldar, in commenting on the Plame subpoena/contempt case, asks what the federal legal journalistic exceptions amount to, and comes up with, not much that's relevant there. Beldar's post here is lengthy, but rich with links to other aspects of the case, and other comments on privilege.
Shield laws that confer limited privilege are the creation of state legislatures. Beyond those, what are we talking about? Common law? Applications of First Amendment jurisprudence? Custom and tradition?
Both "what is" and "what should be" seem to be up for discussion.
First, cards on the table: I'm a transparency freak. I find it utterly absurd that anyone who gets the magic "journalist" label (one that means less and less as time goes on) should get any kind of special legal privaleges to withhold information from the rest of us. All this does is prop up an elite class of information gatekeepers, and that is an unalloyed bad for the open society. Not only that, but it can have perverse consequences when "anonymous" disgruntled government employees feel they can spread disinformation with total unaccountability. (I'm thinking of all the stories about Cheney pressuring the CIA on Iraq intelligence as a perfect example here; those turned out to be complete BS when not a single analyst came forward to testify such things under oath during the SSIC hearings.)
At every stage in history whenever elites have been made accountable through greater transparency, it's the general public that has gained from it. Otherwise we have no choice but to take their word for it. This is not acceptable to me, nor I imagine anyone else who isn't an elitist.
Robin says: "For another thing, we NEED a functioning, objective press for our system of government to work."
I don't know where you got this idea, but AFAIK the very concept of an "objective" press didn't exist before the 20th century. We seemed to get along alright before then. In any case, the concept of an "objective" point of view has always been a chimera. There is simply no such thing as an unbiased viewpoint, and pursuing it is a Quixotic waste of time. What we need to focus on encouraging above all else is intellectual honesty. Part of being intellectually honest is in admitting your biases openly so that they can be taken into account by the reader in his assessment of what you say. It means being able to say "yes I have my own point of view and I believe certain things strongly, but here is an honest account as the facts as I see them and what I think they mean. You can decide for yourself if I'm right or not; I belive what I'm saying to be true, but don't just trust me -- cross-check me against what you know and what others are saying." This puts the intellectual responsibility in the hands of journalists (including amateur ones) and readers alike, which is as it should be.
Transparency, transparency, transparency.
Actually, there are no Supreme Court cases holding that members of the "press" have any rights greater than any other citizen under the Constitution, which is, fundamentally, why Miller, et al. lost their case in the D.C. Circuit.
There are various state statutes (shield laws) that protect reporters from newspapers of general circulation, or broadcast reporters from divulging sources. But I wonder how susceptible those laws would be to being challenged on Constitutional grounds, i.e., the government cannot grant one citizen a greater right to speech than any other citizen.
Robin: The idea that the press' role is to be the opposition to the government is an unfortunate distortion left over from Watergate.
That idea wouldn't be so bad in itself. The real travesty is that they pretend to be a principled and disinterested opposition.
Walter durrenty covered up criomes agaist humanity for Joe Stalin
Eason Jordan covered up crimes agaist humanity for Saddam Hussein
CNN still covers up for Castro
for the leftist media, the only real evil, is a republican.
here in the commentary, the humor is not bad either.
Not bad, look at who funded the defense of a certain leftist lawyer convicted recently of aiding terrorism.
And the OIL from Bribes and Food for Sex with children scandals of the UN, because the media cant find any anti-US ammunition its a non story.
as opposed to how we know they would act, if the USA and Bush could be targeted with it.
Once again, its a political calculation.