Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press:
Judge Trey E. Loftin of the 43rd Judicial District Court in Weatherford, Texas, found that Wilson is not protected under the state’s shield law because “she did not create her blog for the purpose of making money.” The judge also noted that Wilson had no formal education in journalism and made no claims of total objectivity.
When we pass shield laws, we have to decide who’s in and who’s out. As Justice White put it in the 1972 case Branzburg v. Hayes, this type of line-drawing presents “practical and conceptual difficulties of a high order.”
“Sooner or later, it would be necessary to define those categories of newsmen who qualified for the privilege, a questionable procedure in light of the traditional doctrine that liberty of the press is the right of the lonely pamphleteer who uses carbon paper or a mimeograph just as much as of the large metropolitan publisher who utilizes the latest … methods.”
In the pre-Web days, someone like Ms. Cox might have been one more obsessive in the lobby of a newspaper, waiting to show a reporter a stack of documents that proved the biggest story never told. The Web has allowed Ms. Cox to cut out the middleman; various blogs give voice to her every theory, and search algorithms give her work prominence.
BUT! It’s a bit more complicated than most of the media are reporting (as usual). If you look for the words “even if” in the opinion (scroll down), you’ll see why Cox would be on the hook for the $2.5. million regardless of whether she was considered a journalist.
The Oregon shield law at issue doesn’t apply to civil defamation cases, so not even The Oregonian would be protected by it.
Broadly speaking though, it’s a good example of why, as NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen tweets, “courts should protect acts of journalism, not kinds of people.”
