Newspapers Cut Wikileaks Out of Shield Law 602
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the something-about-clubs-and-members dept.
from the something-about-clubs-and-members dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The US press has been pushing for a (much needed) federal shield law, that would allow reporters to protect their sources. It's been something of a political struggle for a few years now, and things were getting close when Wikileaks suddenly got a bunch of attention for leaking all those Afghan war documents. Suddenly, the politicians involved started working on an amendment that would specifically carve out an exception for Wikileaks so that it would not be covered by such a shield law. And, now, The First Amendment Center is condemning the newspaper industry for throwing Wikileaks under the bus, as many in the industry are supporting this new amendment, and saying that Wikileaks doesn't deserve source protection because 'it's not journalism.'"
That has to be a joke (Score:0, Interesting)
Wikileaks doesn't deserve source protection because 'it's not journalism.'
Only because they have redefined what journalism is so almost all 'journalists' now work to increase page views/advert sales and so tend to publish whatever gossip their owners tell them.
Ummmm....wikileaks is foreign (Score:5, Interesting)
What does American law have to do with Wikileaks?
Re:LOLWUT? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Journalists vs. Wikileaks (Score:3, Interesting)
I show up as anonymous because of a site error I'm currently experiencing, not out of cowardice as the auto-naming system implies.
If you think that most US newspapers are doing a good job just look at those statistics about people thinking Obama is a Muslim.
I thought Wikileaks was pretty cool until it published names of Afgan informants which is certainly not cool for many reasons. SO...both groups are looking pretty crappy these days and it's hard to take a side.
Go ahead and shoot the messenger.
The code of ethics for the industry (Score:3, Interesting)
From now on, the Comics Code will apply to all accredited news outlets with the force of law. Everybody else will be ordered to shut up.
Re:Journalism ain't what it used to be (Score:3, Interesting)
On what planet?
I am glad to see you approach journalism with skepticism, but the truth is somewhere in between (I hate that phrase).
There always have been journalists who were willing to take risks to bring important information to the public. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Seldes [wikipedia.org] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.F._Stone [wikipedia.org] During the McCarthy days, there really were risks -- many people were blacklisted and unable to work, and quite a few were sent to jail for publishing unpopular ideas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_v._United_States [wikipedia.org]
It is true that people like Seldes were a minority, and he printed what he did because the major newspapers didn't print it.
It didn't all start with Amy Goodman.
But if you want to challenge powerful, greedy, unscrupulous interests, you have to expect them to fight back and not let a concern for freedom of ideas get in their way.
You can't depend on the law to protect you. You're better off having anonymous distribution. The American revolution was debated in anonymous pamphlets. A technical means to anonymous distribution might be better than a law.
Re:LOLWUT? (Score:5, Interesting)
A sports reporter tweeted on Monday (this week or last week, i'm getting this second hand) that a ballplayer's suspension would be 5 games instead of 4.
Numerous outlets picked it up and ran it as news.
Thing is, he made it up. Deliberately. To demonstrate how many news outlets do zero confirmatory investigation before running stories.
So what did his employer do?
Fired him.
I.e., it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Re:In an alternate historical timeline (Score:4, Interesting)
Richard M. Nixon, after successfully driving to repeal the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, goes on to third and fourth presidential terms.
Thanks in no small part to Dr. Manhattan winning Vietnam for us.
Re:LOLWUT? (Score:3, Interesting)
the tag line on the site suggests this is a "nerd" site however, and fighting oppression with force certainly does matter.
however the REAL point of my argument that you obviously missed, busy doing whatever geeks do, was: THE MEDIA IS NOT IN CONTROL.
Re:LOLWUT? (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot longer than that, if you believe/read Chomsky. Challenging the wrong people is a career damaging move.
Re:There's precident (Score:3, Interesting)
No actually it doesn't. It say "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Now many would interpret that as separate statements. It is saying since a militia is necessary to a free state, the right to bare arms shall not be infringed. In fact when you read documents by the founding fathers and look at activities of the time, this is how it was interpreted. Normal citizens owned and kept standard military rifles, be the members of a militia or not. Also states had various militia groups, not at all under the control or regulation of the federal government. Also notice that per 10USC311 all males between 17 and 45 are members of the unorganized militia.
Now then the first amendment says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Notice that it says congress shall not abridge the freedom of the press. However it doesn't specify that the press is just anyone. So by the same sort of reading of the second amendment saying that it only applies to the militia, then we can say the freedom of the press only applies to the press. So who is the press? Well that isn't specified so that comes down to statutory law.
I'm not saying that these are arguments you should want or accept the government using, I'm showing how playing the end run game gives precedent and can lead to things like this. When you start saying that the bill of rights aren't all individual rights you run in to this. It isn't a situation where you can say "But that's only for the ones I don't like."
Re:LOLWUT? (Score:3, Interesting)
It was about 50x in 1970 (40 years ago) and is between 450 and 525x today (depending on your source).
Who is better for the economy - one person earning $13 million and spending $4 million or 260 people earning $13 million and spending $12 million?
The CEO's (and wealthy) are killing the economy by paying low wages or not hiring at all.
Re:Thin end of the wedge (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a difference between saying that you only get the protection if you're somehow accredited (whether it be by the government or by a separate, professional body) and saying you can or cannot publish stories at all. (As with free speech, you can publish what you want, but you may face consequences for publishing things, like libelous or classified material.)
In the end, this would be a new protection that the constitution doesn't appear to already grant journalists, so it's hard to see that not extending it to everyone is necessarily unconstitutional.
Re:LOLWUT? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't condemn Drudge at all! I congratulate him for putting "real" journalist's feet to the fire like Jon Stewart (oh the irony).
My point is: how exactly is he different than Wikileaks? That's my point! He was famous for headlining the Monica Lewinsky scandal -- exposing abuse at the expense of the American interest. He's as much a journalist as anything Wikileaks exposes! Likewise, my hope is that Wikileaks will become a prime bookmark (maybe not homepage) for journalists in the future but the QUANTITY of novel information they have provided is unprecedented. But the "real" journalists still use these antiquated guys as critical tools for their "journalism" to lead their stories. Not much of an investigative journalism budget for MSM now-a-days.
Again, non-wire, original journalism is NOT in the MSM. I think we can both agree on that, no matter what your views are (unless your the head of CNN/Fox/MSNBC)...
Really, I think everyone in the US can agree that the MSM is shit and we need to finance independment (non-corporate) media. I know the tea parties have my back on that. Liberals would probably agree on that as well!. They would just have to STRICTLY restrict corporate financing.
What would the world be like then?!
Re:There's precident (Score:3, Interesting)
Assange broke the laws of Australia, where he is a citizen, when he released another country's secrets.
In any case, there is legal means for the information to be released, and he refused to request that. He could have kept asking people in the government to do it, until he ran out of people. At that point, he might have had a case for finding another way to release it. But since the law is clear that if the information is improperly classified it must be declassified, and since the law is clear on the procedure for declassification to ensure anything that should still be classified remains classified, it would actually be illegal to turn down his request, and illegal to do anything to him because he requested it. Thus he wouldn't have had to go very far before finding someone willing to declassify it.
The other side of the aisle would have sufficed, no matter which side he started on.
But Assange does not care about the law, He doesn't even understand the law.
Nor does he care about ethics, which would have led him to care about the law that allowed the information to be released properly.
What he did hurt a lot more people than it helped, and helped the wrong people a lot more than the right people. I'm one of those people who believes that there is nowhere that such a thing is the right thing to do.
Re:Thin end of the wedge (Score:5, Interesting)
blowhard overexposure (Score:3, Interesting)
Chomsky belongs to the same group as Steve Jobs and Rush Limbaugh and RMS. These people are not as common as you make out. Reality distortion fields that work on some (or most) of the people all of the time are a rare achievement.
I was watching Chomsky debates on YouTube the other day. It's hard to figure out what he's actually doing in his debating tactic. He seems to be convinced that human agency is a straight line, and therefore nearly any unknown can be brushed off the table at the first hint of smoking gun.
One tactic he used in the videos I watched boiled down to "some high level government official once wrote in a memo a bald confession of the true motive behind the initiative". He often adds something to the effect that "you can read it yourself". The logical foundation seems to be that high level government officials never colour outside the lines and that a certain type of memo that spills the beans negates 1000 official communications that adhere to the party line. I'm sure there's a grain of truth to that. Chomsky never pauses to assess whether it's a small grain or a large grain. That seems to be the essence of his rhetorical style: all grains of truth contrary to the hegemonic administration are created equal under God.
I've never been much of a Chomsky fan, but he's worth listening to from time to time.
Speaking of Rush, his debating tactics are certainly worse as noted by an irate movie critic. Put up or shut up [suntimes.com]
Rush has two primary demographics: the stupid, whom he addles, and the smug, who enjoy watching the former. This simple act never seems to grow stale.
Re:LOLWUT? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sadly I'd say this is yet another one we can chalk up to those that scream "deregulation! Less Government!" getting what they asked for. There used to be laws that you couldn't own more than one per city, and a max of 28 I think, when it came to media like radio, TV, and print, to keep from one voice dominating. Of course once those laws were struck down what did we get? Clear Channel and mega monopolies.
Sadly our media has become just as corrupted by the greed of the 1%ers (look up the tax rate during the post WWII boom years on the top 1%, it was nearly 90%, because they knew too much greed equaled destruction of markets) and now only parrot what those corporate masters want them to say. I'm just waiting for the spin to get so bad it comes off like that scene from Airplane! II "Four alarm fire makes way for GLORIOUS new tractor factory!". Hell I wouldn't trust our entire media conglomerate as far as I can chunk a widescreen.
Re:Ummmm....wikileaks is foreign (Score:4, Interesting)
Hell, even Australia is doing censorship and filtering
As an Australian I feel compelled to correct this.
Certainly politicians have tried to get a filter implemented. In fact there have been a series of them. It started with Kim Beazly [wikipedia.org] (leader of the opposition at the time, who first made it ALP Policy [libertus.net], the ALP being the mob who ran the country for the last 3 years), then we had Kevin Rudd [wikipedia.org] (Prime Minster), Stephen Conroy [wikipedia.org] (Communications Minister), Brian Harradine [wikipedia.org] (independent who held the balance of power in the Senate), and Steve Fielding [wikipedia.org] (who saw himself as Harradine's successor) all pushed very hard for it. They were aided and abetted some the local elites, such as Clive Hamilton [wikipedia.org] (a Professor of Public Ethics and Vice-Chancellor's of Charles Sturt University) churning out papers in support of the filter. It is a truly impressive list of heavy hitters.
Yet, they failed. Now the opposition has formally rejected the idea it looks dead and buried.
For me it was a painful period in Australia's political history. Every time the issue was brought up on a forum that allowed public comments, the comments ran at about 20 to 1 against the idea. Regardless this mob tried to ram it though for 3 electoral cycles. Had they succeeded you could have truly said Australia democracy was doing a lousy job of representing the people doing the voting.
But despite having their hands firm on the leavers of power and the public megaphones (no newspaper editorial outside of the tech industry strongly rejected the idea) they didn't succeed. I don't know whether this means Australia's hands are safer than the US's, as the US has a better constitution. But it certainly has given me a new found faith in Australian style democracy.
Re:LOLWUT? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well I don't want to pay for a military that does nothing but prop up third world dictators and help megacorps make profits, I don't want to give tax breaks to the 1%ers that are seriously fucking this country and using their wealth to subvert our laws, nor do I want to pay for forcing the corporate way of "life" onto other nations with "secret treaties" like ACTA, but sadly we have lost any control we once had in this country, with dems and repubs being two sides of the same coin, so the poor might as well grab what they can. It is only a matter of time until the megacorps burn the whole thing down for the insurance money. After all it isn't like they pay taxes here anyway (Haliburton is now in Dubai, I think MSFT is considered Irish now, etc) so why should they care about anything but MOAR TAX BREAKS NOM NOM NOM NOM!
Oh and you might want to look at the tax rate on the 1%ers during the "boom years" when we had our greatest prosperity. Hint, it was actually 90%. Now many of the top fortune 500 actually get money back instead of paying in. But if you really don't want to help the poor, just use offshore accounts and a good accountant. It works for the mega-rich, so why shouldn't you do the same? But before you trot out the old "lazy poor" meme, why don't you come to a state like AR where whole towns lie like corpses and people are getting food stamps while working two jobs because the only work is a "McJob" and then get back to me ,kay? And good luck finding a job when corps are NOT punished for hiring illegals and the border leaks like a sieve. I have watched the entire construction industry in my state wiped out by illegals who'll work dangerous unsafe conditions for pennies. Maybe you think that's the way we should go? Just be another India style country where the poor can die in the streets?
Finally we tried that "just use local charity" thing before, remember? That is how come Ray Charles was blind, lack of a common vitamin. You seem to be forgetting many churches have been replaced by "mega worship" where the only "charity" is going into that new mega Trinitron. Hell this whole damned country has become so greedy we might as well change our anthem to "mighty mighty dollar bill" and be done with it. But sure, you keep right on believing the poor prefer living in rat holes and eating garbage than actually having a job. I'd love to see YOU live on what the poor and disabled get. I know from a relative the disabled get a whole $723 a month and $86 in food stamps for a single male. Boy, that's living!-