FEC Rules Bloggers Are Journalists 363
Dotnaught writes "The Federal Election Commission today issued an advisory opinion that finds the Fired Up network of blogs qualifies for the 'press exemption' to federal campaign finance laws. The press exemption, as defined by Congress, is meant to assure 'the unfettered right of the newspapers, TV networks, and other media to cover and comment on political campaigns.' The full ruling is available at the FEC site. A noteworthy passage: '...an entity otherwise eligible for the press exception would not lose its eligibility merely because of a lack of objectivity...'"
Duh! (Score:4, Insightful)
> its eligibility merely because of a lack of objectivity..."
Well of course not. Otherwise they would have to close down CBS and Fox News right off the bat. And then come back and get CNN, ABC and NBC the next day. On the third day they would shutter the NY Times, the Washington Post and pull the plug on the EIB Network's sat feed.
Of course by day four folks would show up in Washington with their 'Sporting Goods' and voice their 'opinion' about Campaign Finance Reform, reminding Congress that in the end the 1st Amendment, along with the rest are ultimately preserved by a willingness to exercise the 2nd Amendment.
Why this is necessary (Score:4, Insightful)
McCain/Feingold campaign finance laws, which limit the Freedom of Speech of anyone with a political opinion, forces us to define what types of speech should remain legal.
It's sad and disappointing.
Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)
A decision by the FCC that I can actually agree with and think is good for everybody. Will wonders never cease?!
Amendment I (Score:5, Insightful)
Freedom of speech applies to political speech. Campaign finance laws are blatantly unconstitutional. This ruling is offensive because it implies that only established and recognized "press" entities qualify -- and the government, whose interest is markedly not neutral, gets to decide who is and isn't "press".
Re:Duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
These mostly got bought up or run out of business, until now when only a relatively small number of much larger papers and media companies run everything.
The bloggers are kind of like a return to that old model for print media in the U.S., I think, except way harder to buy out or run out of business, since most of them aren't even really in business. Biased indie papers are nothing new, and blogging is just the latest version of it. It was media then, it's media now.
This is encouraging, but (Score:4, Insightful)
Free speech good, but bloggers AREN'T journalists (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess this is just part of the price of free speech. I do wonder if there's a good interface for "moderating" blogs, so that, for example, if one is sponsored by Candidate X in a sneaky way, and someone finds out, it can appear beside the name of the blog.
I'd also like to point out a fundamental difference between bloggers and journalists. I have worked at a newspaper, and spent all day calling people, attending government meetings, doing research and asking more questions before I wrote something. Bloggers tend to link to the work of real reporters, then offer comments, or worse, just repeat rumors as fact. At best, they are information scavengers, feeding on the facts hunted down by others.
Because a newspaper has advertisers and subscribers, it has to protect its reputation as being truthful. A blogger has nothing at stake. A newspaper also expects to get sued and tries to have a "truth defense" ready - to cover their butts by being accurate. They might not always succeed, but they have reason to try. I don't know whether any bloggers have been sued for libel yet, but I bet some will be. If you're going to "publish" something, you really do need to check your facts, and that usually takes more time than a hobbyist has.
Re:Why this is necessary (Score:3, Insightful)
But, for ever 100 why we should get rid of free speech, there is one or two why we shouldn't. And those are always the large one. For every "I did insane thing x to piss people off but they can't get mad because I call it art" one comes across, there is that need for "The government is doing evil thing z" and "We need a fix for problem q that people want to sweep under the rug."
It's like that old saying: "Democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the others." As bad as free speech can be, that can't compare to how bad things could be without it.
I agree with you. It is sad that we had to get bloggers declared "Journalists". What is the difference between a blogger and a reporting writing a little bit every day for a newspaper about the story he is investigating as he follows it (as some have done in the past) besides the immediacy?
Not all bloggers are Journalists, but that doesn't mean no Journalists are bloggers.
Re:Duh! (Score:3, Insightful)
The "fair and balanced" comes in during the real news broadcasts. They give both sides a chance to talk about the issue, which is a LOT more than ABC, NBC, or CBS does. Usually they just get one side to talk about what the other side is doing, and they don't give the other side a chance to answer any of the charges. That, frankly, is biased crap.
People might not like the fact that the "other side" gets a chance to speak on those issues, but it's a helluva lot more than most television news and newspapers do these days.
I completely disagree about the international news agencies too... they (both left and right) have their own axes to grind.
Always the geek. Running the numbers... (Score:2, Insightful)
CBS - left
Fox - right
CNN - left
ABC -left
NBC -left
NY Times - left
Washington Post - right
EIB - right, but never claims to be "press", usually comments on "press". Certainly not a "primary source"... I'll give it 1/2 right.
So, from this sample we have 2:1 left bias in the media.
Is the ruling pro-right, pro-left, or just correct?
Good precedent (Score:3, Insightful)
Freedom of the press must survive though, so this seems a fair response to our evolving times.
Bias is OK (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course they aren't balanced. Which, in a sort of paradox, makes them balanced since they now singlehandendly counterbalance the 'progressive' biases of the rest of the nets. Sort of a TV version of Limbaugh's infamous "I don't need equal time, I am equal time!".
Personally I don't mind bias all that much as long as it is in the open and Fox does often admit that while they make an effort to present both sides, they do come at issues with a conservative viewpoint. Neither Bill O'Reilly or Maureen Dowd bother me since both are pretty open about their position advocacy. What pisses me off is when asshats like Dan Rather or Helen Thomas claim with a straight face to be impartial in their reporting when they are as biased as Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken.
Or take the Sunday morning yak yak shows. I don't get Face the Nation over my local CBS station, but both NBC's Meet the Press and ABC's This Week program are hosted by former Democratic Party aparatchiks with no major experience in journalism prior to taking the helm at their respective high prestige posts? Harmless Coincidence? We are supposed to believe both are presenting a 'balanced' view of politics?
Re:Duh! (Score:3, Insightful)
B.
Re:Amendment I (Score:4, Insightful)
This is about freedom. Fuck politics. We can say what we want. If that one fact is no longer true, then this is no longer the same America I thought I was growing up in.
Re:Always the geek. Running the numbers... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Washington Post has a bias toward the right? I'm not sure I can agree with that. I consider myself pretty allergic to any strong conservative bias; few things pain me more than sitting through the O'Reilly Factor. I've never considered the Washington Post to have any such bias. If they do, it's either too clever or too weak for me to pick up on.
I would also argue that simply tallying up "left versus right" bias is useless with regards to determining the state of our mass media. By its very nature, political bias is anything but a black-and-white issue.
Re:Duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think when some people think of "Media", they think of NYT, USA Today, ABC News, CNN, and their locally circulated newspaper, news stations, etc.
There's a lot more to media than just this. There are a great number of publications that are extremely biased, small indie newsletters, mini magazines and who knows what other formats. There are publications geared toward the military, toward eco-friendly folks, and everything up down and in-between.
And what's more amazing, is that most libraries carry these for their surrounding communities. Check it out sometime
Brice
Re:Oh, the dictators in power (Score:4, Insightful)
It's time to quit the petty left/right bullshit. We have more important matters to deal with, like simple freedoms we used to have. Let's deal with those important issues, then get back to our petty bickering.
Thanks.
Re:Amendment I (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why this is necessary (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you?
Paid bloggers wouldn't even work here (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd imagine that there are two broad sides in all of this: those who are independent regardless of ideology and those who shill for the bifactional ruling party know as the Republican and Democratic parties. Who cares if the RNC or DNC pays someone to sing the praises of their candidate? Unless they're outright lying, they'll just garner the attention of the party faithful. The bloggers in the first category and most of their friends and readers won't buy into it because they're on the opposite side of the philosophical fence.
But what is amusing here is that blogging is just a way of maintaining a website. Most bloggers are not journalists because of the simple fact that their work cannot be considered journalistic. Perhaps Michelle Malkin's blog should count, but it'd be a cold day in hell that I'd consider the average blogger to be a journalist. If you're not a professional jouralist, then you aren't one IMO. The concept of a "citizen journalist" is redundant. The point of using "citizen" as a modifier is to show that you are a civilian doing a government job. Hence "citizen soldier" for example. That's a miltiaman, a man who fights as part of a civilian army organized in a military-like hierarchy. He's a soldier, but not a government soldier thus he's a "citizen soldier." Since America has only a lame-brained attempt at state media (*cough*CPB*cough*) there is no way you can qualify as a "citizen journalist." Either journalism is your career or it is something you amateurishly ape.
FEC madness.. (Score:3, Insightful)
> If a reporter or editor wants to endorse Bill Gates for president, they can do it. They can write a 2,000 word puff piece about how great he is and publish it in the New York Times.
> Unless of course, they quit their job and want to pay the New York Times to run the exact same article, word for word. This would now be a violation of campaign finance laws, because only reporters and editors are allowed to have opinions. If a private citizen has an opinion, he's trying to destroy the democratic process.
> Unless the non-reporter's name happens to be Bill Gates, in which case it becomes legal again. The Supreme Court has said that you can always spend money campaigning for yourself.
End result: Rich people can finance their own campaigns without any limits (see Ross Perot), but middle-class types are breaking the law if they buy ads endorsing a candidate they would like to see elected. That, and the First Amendment is flushed down the toilet.
Re:Always the geek. Running the numbers... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Free speech good, bloggers ARE TOO journalists (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd much rather deal with 'blog who make no pretense. I'll do my own fact checking rather than rely on unseen gnomes to do it to my satisfaction.
Re:Duh! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Amendment I (Score:3, Insightful)
No. You are the opinion that counts. You are the final authority.
Or at least, you used to be, until you gave that up and assigned that right to someone else.
The amendment, as written, is intended to give everyone an equal voice in the eyes of government, not to allow the rich and/or powerful to steamroll the country because they're louder and have flashier commercials.
The amendment, as written, is to ensure that government will not abridge free speech. It's that simple, really.
Re:Why this is necessary (Score:2, Insightful)
In addition, money does not vote, nor does the abundance of money increase the number of votes allotted to any one citizen. The poor college student has the same one vote that the rich oil tycoon has.
What is it you want to prevent? Voter fraud? That has nothing to do with campaign financing.
If you are saying that monetary contributors to campaigns ought to be restricted because of the possibility of "buying politicians", then should you also go so far as to prevent those contributors from paying for advertisements themselves? Should you prevent anyone with a political opinion from distributing that opinion?
The key issue here is the erosion of the Freedom of Speech. It is not about the corruption of politicians. If you want to bring the opinions of the Founding Fathers into this, I think you will find that they were rather in favor of citizens being able to speak their opinions, especially political opinions, and created the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America in order to prevent the government from creating laws that restricted speech.
News Fits (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:FEC madness.. (Score:3, Insightful)
"Freedom of speech", to my ears, sounds a lot more like "freedom TO speak" than "freedom FROM speaking", or even than "freedom FROM other people's speaking."
Likewise, "freedom of the press" would seem to be a lot closer in my mind to "freedom TO run a press" then "freedom FROM those running the press".
And given the (admittedly imperfect) freedom of opportunity in the U.S. (that's a freedom TO opportunity, not a freedom FROM opportunity), if you want to buy bigger ads than the opponent, then you are free to earn/beg/raise enough money to do so.
Of course, if we did away with the artificially-created entities known as "corporations", and realized again that only individual citizens, not mythical on-paper aggregations of them, have rights, that would go a long way toward equalizing that freedom of opportunity, and would make a lot of the campaign finance laws unnecessary in the first place. But that's a whole nother kettle of fish.
Furthermore, politicians should have their advertising budgets capped and paid for by the government.
Speaking as a libertarian, I agree. Every single candidate, regardless of party affiliation, experience, competence, degree of insanity, or number of tinfoil hats, should be eligible to fill out a form and get a check (the exact same amount for every one of 'em) covering all possible campaign expenses. And the money to fund this should come out of the pockets of every person who ever spoke in favor of campaign finance reform in any way. Let them put their money where their mouths are.
Me, I'll continue giving my (very limited) political donations to the candidates I support, and keep insisting that it's my absolute right to do so.
Re:Duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said; the fact is, unbalanced or not, FOX has the right to broadcast whatever message suits their purposes. It certainly isn't the government's job to dictate how politics are covered. Not that profit motive or the free market will dictate a plan of action that guarantees intelligent broadcasting or commendable journalism. Hell, in a counrty where Britney Spears and reality TV can dominate the airwaves, popular opinion and commercial support aren't worth all that much in the intellectual domain.
The media cannot be counted on to provide us with an intelligent view of the world. That is on our own shoulders. Liberal, conservative... it doesn't matter. They have all got their morons and those that have a clue. Just learn to watch with doubt- all that takes is an ability to smell bullshit when its presented to you. Then, maybe, the media could really be held accountable.
Tooba
Dig Deeper (Score:4, Insightful)
This is about money that the parties and candidates spend paying "bloggers" to write about how good they are.
The issue here is not free speach. It has been spun. The issue here is if someone is being paid to write something in a blog, then they should have to make that clear on the blog. There is a difference between an opinion piece and propaganda.
If 500 people all write in support of an issue and it turns out that they have been paid to all support that issue, it isn't really a grass roots support movement, is it?
This boils back down to the same issue as the gov. paying "journalists" to create fake news reports about certain issues.
I have no problem with parties and candidates paying people to write good things about them, I just want to know if what I am reading is someone's opinion or a campaign ad.
Only if your malice can be proved (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Amendment I (Score:4, Insightful)
The most beautiful five-word phrase in the English language.
Re:Ah... so only the moneyed may speak? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Free speech good, but bloggers AREN'T journalis (Score:3, Insightful)
Is that different than when real journalists just re-hash everything from a press conference? Or when journalists pick and choose which expert testimony they want to go forward with if they have dissenting testimony?
Don't put journalists on a pedestal. The days where journalists did hard digging to get out the truth seems to be long gone, at least in this country. A blogger has just as much right to put their spin on the facts as the journalists that writes it in a paper.
Re:Is this really good for free speech? (Score:3, Insightful)
You speak of the "government" as if it is one monolithic entity that actually knows what all of it's hands are doing. The FEC decided that bloggers were journalist - not any other government agency. For FEC purposes they are journalist. This does not mean that, for example, the Supreme Court thinks of bloggers as journalist or that any other part of the government thinks of bloggers as journalist. This decision has to do with campaign finance, period.
Re:Always the geek. Running the numbers... (Score:4, Insightful)
In an ideal, black body radiation sort of way, it's impossible to find a reporter who is completely without bias. And you wouldn't want to read him if you found him. Ultimately, journalism is partly about reporting and partly about synthesizing and interpreting events. And events have many interpretations.
Good journalists are fair-minded. They're more concerned with what is true than who is right. They aren't in there to change your mind, just to let you in on what's happening in the world. They'll have a bias, but they know it, acknowledge it, and work extra hard to ensure that their coverage isn't tainted by it.
Bad journalists follow the creed of Cargo Cult Science. That is: "I already know what's true, now let me go prove it." They may be right sometimes, but their process is tainted and you won't know when they're right. And, really, they don't either. They're in journalism because they want to change the world, and protect people from evil bad guys who tell lies. There are bad conservative journalists, and bad liberal ones, but until the rise of Fox, most journalists were liberal, so most bad ones were too.
It's no accident that journalism scandals came up right as blogs were getting big. A rise of a massive citizen journalism, biased individually but usually not collectively, suddenly put the news empires on the spot. Liberals insist that blogs are primarily a liberal movement, and conservatives claim that it's mostly conservative. The truth is that you read the blogs you agree with, so you feel like your side is huge. We don't really know where the overall centroid is.
Incidentally, I think that programmers are both artists and engineers-- which I think is why programmers still don't fall easily into a political category, even though we are all definitely on the same wave lengths... even when we disagree.
Re:Amendment I (Score:3, Insightful)
Not all speech is created equal. See, in order for people to hear what you're saying, you have to put it in some kind of medium. And media are private, for-profit entities, which means more money=more message
If this were true, then I might be able to tell you what was on CBS last night. I can't. I chose not to watch it because I liked what was on another channel better. If CBS had absolute freedom of speech, they might have aired porn last night; but so would have all the other networks. It's not the money. It's who has the best stuff. If money really mattered that much, Steve Forbes and Ross Perot would have become president. They didn't. The voters, as stupid as they can be some times, are still smart enough to change the channel. When the candidates are roughly equal, the money helps, but then the fact that the candidates were roughly equal negates any injustice caused by the money in the first place, doesn't it? Whatever injustice there may be in the money speaking louder, it's small and not worth trashing the first ammendment in my opinion, and in the opinion of many others too that I know--as long as they are allowed to express that opinion!
Re:Duh! (Score:2, Insightful)
Where are these rights defined in the constitution?
The process of deciding how our legislative body would be composed took quite a long time. The reason? It is hard to allow the majority to express its will while still protecting the minority from oppression. You know, the type of oppression the Pilgrims suffered in Europe. And mind you, when I say minority I am NOT just talking about liberals in this administration or conservatives in the last. I am talking about racial minorities, religious minorities, and any other type of minority. We live in a large and complex world, not one where you stand on either one side or the other. That is simplistic and will not get us anywhere.
But, as I was saying, in the end our Congress was divided into a House of Representatives and a Senate. The point of the Senate was to give those smaller states, those whose interests would be in the minority a place where their opinions have weight.
In my original post, I was talking about freedom of speech, not the workings of the Congressional machine. The media has the right to report unimpeded by the government. That has absolutely nothing to do with who is in power.
This is not a democracy. The majority rules.....PERIOD.
Exactly. This is NOT a democracy. It is in a pure democracy, however, that the majority really does rule. The decisions are based purely on a popular vote of all the people. If the population hates Jews, they could be voted off the island. If they think you need to pray to Ecto Cooler or be damned to hell, they can vote to make you do it every day at noon. This is not the way our country works. The minority has rights like the right to speak their minds, the right to assemble peaceably, the right to practice whatever religion suits them. These are the core rights our country was founded on. These are the rights that allow FOX to broadcast its brand of proto-journalism, and allows ultra-violent videogames a place in the market... Oh, sorry, I forgot we were in the middle of trying to give our rights back to the government. Those videogames wll probably be suffering some of the same useless morality legislation that sparked reefer madness back in the day.
I don't care if you love this administration, hate abortion, oppose stem cell research, support war in Iraq, think American citizens should be stripped of habeus corpus at the President's command, or believe torture is the best way to extract information from a suspect. What I do care about is if you simply accept the talking points of a well oiled organization whose prime purpose is to accumulate votes. It would be much healthier for our country if politics were not an us or them decision. Please note, while I do have many socially liberal views, I am NOT a Democrat. I am quite conservative in how I view government. It should be small and efficient. Social programs should be run as cheaply as possible, and the defense budget should not be allowed to explode into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Like you said: Passion is great, but try taking a breath and thinking before your react.
Tooba
Re:Free speech good, but bloggers AREN'T journalis (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment B: "Bloggers [...] At best, they are information scavengers, feeding on the facts hunted down by others."
Er, um, weren't you just feeding on the facts told to you by the people you called, the meetings you attended, and the answers to questions you asked? You're an info scavenger!
Also, you're confusing "editorial commentary" with "hard news." Most bloggers are editorialists and are, by definition, offering their opinion on the events of the day. They research the issues and present their opinion.
You're just a j-school snob, and a pretty confused one at that.