As written by Wikipedia "The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances." Many Americans interpret the First Amendment as it pertains to freedom of press to cover free-lance reporting. Since many people feel there should be such a broad interpretation of the First Amendment to protect bloggers, without a Supreme Court decision to make this liberal view of a free press the law, people in Syracuse are concerned about a recent U.S. District Court decision to fine a blogger for $2.5 million for not being officially a journalist.
Peter Pachal has reported for Mashable "Judge Hits Blogger With $2.5 Million Charge for Not Being a Journalist." A frightening message has been sent to the blogger community by a U.S. District Court judge who has ruled that a blogger must pay $2.5 million to an investment firm she wrote about, because she isn’t a real journalist. Judge Marco A. Hernandez has said Crystal Cox, who runs several blogs, wasn’t entitled to the protections afforded to journalists, because she wasn’t “affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system.”
The Obsidian Finance Group has sued Cox for $10 million for writing several blog posts which are critical of the company and its co-founder, Kevin Padrick. Obsidian has argued that the writing was defamatory. Cox chose to represent herself in court. Without the source for some of her information the judge ruled that Cox couldn’t prove the information in the post was true. And, according to the judge, she didn’t qualify for Oregon’s media shield law since she wasn’t employed by a media establishment. In the court’s eyes, she was seen as a blogger, not a journalist. The penalty invoked by the court was $2.5 million.
There has been a debate over whether bloggers are journalists for years. However, the consensus has been largely settled, on the opposite side of what Judge Hernandez has ruled in his court. Attorney Bruce E. H. Johnson, who has written the media shield laws in next-door Washington State, has said that those laws would have protected Cox if her case been tried in Washington. It appears that cracking down on bloggers should be interpreted as a violation of First Amendment guarantees for freedom of press for people who for one reason or another may be working on their own. Independence after all is a characteristic which Americans traditionally are said to admire.
