Regulating Cyberspace?

The media business may be in general disrepute these days, but suddenly, everyone wants to be a journalist.

Or at least be classified as a journalist, to reap the benefits thereof.

I'm not one of these people who thinks you need a graduate degree, an ID card or an official stamp of approval to call yourself a journalist. Anyone with an idea and a computer can now play the role of reporter, commentator or social critic. People can tell the difference between a New York Times correspondent and BozoBlogger.com, and both have something to contribute.

But this is starting to matter for legal reasons. Time magazine's Matt Cooper and Judith Miller of the New York Times may wind up going to jail for protecting their sources in the Valerie Plame case, but at least they have the standing as journalists to challenge the prosecutor who wants to imprison them. Would a blogger have the same standing?

What about the heavy hand of government regulation? The Federal Election Commission, as you may have heard, is considering slapping some restrictions on political bloggers following a federal judge's ruling on some McCain-Feingold litigation.

The question, says FEC member Bradley Smith, is whether blogs that support Candidate X are in effect providing unpaid advertising to his campaign -- especially if they provide links to X's Web site. He says some sites could receive a "press exemption," though I can't for the life of me figure out how you would draw the line. Here's a Smith interview with CNET News.McCain and Feingold, for their part, say this is "misinformation from the anti-reform crowd." Feingold blogs about it here.

The blogosphere, as you might imagine, is up in arms, with LaShawn Barber saying:

"The one thing uniting liberal and conservative bloggers is a threat to our First Amendment rights. I may not agree with my liberal counterparts, but I wholeheartedly support their right to blog. The latest misinformation from the anti-reform crowd is the suggestion that our bill will require regulation of blogs and other Internet communications."

Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters says any such regulations would put him out of business:

"If my links to political sites such as Georgewbush.com and Johnkerry.com counted as contributions and I was forced to accept responsibility for the cash value that the FEC designated to them, I would have been charged with several misdemeanors and possibly felonies, as I provided many such links during the past election cycle.

"During this cycle, my blog published over 680 essays on the presidential election. In fact, I linked to Senator Kerry's site four times as often as President Bush's site, which would have meant to the FEC that I was a major contributor to his campaign -- when in fact I opposed Senator Kerry and supported President Bush. These regulations would have forced me to retain the services of a full-time accountant and retain an attorney to understand when and where I overcontributed. At the very least, the burden of proof would be on me to make the FEC believe that my blog does not constitute in-kind contributions subject to the limits imposed on both hard and soft money contributions.

"The effect of this would have been to force me to shut down my blog, or convert it to something else. In fact, it would have caused me less legal heartache to convert my site to a porn blog and do nothing but post hard-core pictures all day long."

Not everyone on the FEC agrees with Smith's suggestions, as Roll Call reports:

"Amid a growing hysteria sweeping the Internet over the idea that the Federal Election Commission intends to crack down on bloggers, some FEC officials say they are open to creating an exemption for those who maintain Web logs to ensure they are in no danger of being caught up in the agency's regulatory framework. 'People have images in their minds that the FEC has black helicopters ready to sweep down on people sitting in their pajamas at their computers. I assure you, we have no intention' of doing anything like that, said Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat who sits on the commission."

Slate Editor Jacob Weisberg takes a broader view of the who-is-a-journalist question:

"Many old-line journalists have tried to define their work in a ways that exclude the new aspirants. Institutionalized journalists argue that bloggers don't do conventional reporting, aren't accurate, aren't responsible, or aren't paid -- and hence are not genuine reporters. They fret that the current influx of amateurs will undermine professional standards or that seasoned professionals will be unfairly brought down by an electronic lynch mob, as some posit that Dan Rather of CBS and Eason Jordan of CNN were.

"Disregard all such self-interested whining. The breakdown of what once were formidable barriers to entry in the field of journalism is good news for democracy as a whole and for the press itself. The great cacophony of voices in the blogosphere means that more views are being represented, that more subjects are being examined in detail, and that more sunlight shines into institutions of all kinds. Thousands of bloggers ranting from their soapboxes mean that our political culture encompasses bracing debate about everything people disagree about. If you don't like this raucous clamor emanating from cyberspace, you're not really comfortable with democracy.

"For journalism, the Internet is having an even more immediate but no less beneficial effect. Blogs and Internet publications have essentially solved one of the biggest worries of the past few decades, that media consolidation is diminishing independence and plurality of voices. At another level, the ability for readers to respond to the mainstream press is raising standards of accuracy, care, and professionalism. Simply put, you can't get away with being lazy or careless anymore, because too many self-appointed patrolmen are trying to catch you jaywalking. The 'MSM' is unlikely to embrace competition from bloggers, because what business ever really embraces new competition? But competition is healthy nonetheless both for those who face it and for society as a whole."

Meanwhile, there's still more litigation that could affect the Freedom to Blog, as the New York Times reports:

"Apple has long had a devoted following, and leaked information about new Apple products has appeared on Web sites for years. To combat this, the company filed the suit late last year against the sources of these leaks -- people the company assumes are employees or contractors.

"Apple has asked the court to compel the Web sites that displayed the product information to disclose their identity. Bloggers are fighting Apple's efforts, which it has focused on three Web sites -- Thinksecret.com, Appleinsider.com and PowerPage.org. The judge in the case, James Kleinberg, is required only to interpret a California statute that recognizes a privilege protecting reporters in keeping news sources confidential."

Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum unearths an academic study of blog-land by researchers Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance:

"The primary finding of the study (or at least the finding I think is the most interesting) is that conservative blogs have a stronger sense of community than liberal blogs -- a quality that I often wish liberals could emulate. Here's what Adamic and Glance found:

"Conservatives link to other conservative blogs at a much higher rate than liberals link to other liberals: .20 links per post compared to .12 links per post.

"Conservative bloggers have a more 'uniform voice' than liberal bloggers, as measured by what they link to. If you count only links to blogs, not media reports, the difference in uniformity is even greater. (However, on another measure, the 'echo chamber' quality of liberal and conservative blogs is about the same.)

"Liberal bloggers tend to link to a fairly small subset of other liberals. Conservatives spread the link love around. The study also found (unsurprisingly) that blogs are primarily a medium based on criticism, not support:

"Notice the overall pattern: Democrats are the ones more often cited by right-leaning bloggers, while Republicans are more often mentioned by left-leaning bloggers. . . . These statistics indicate that our A-list political bloggers, like mainstream journalists (and like most of us) support their positions by criticizing those of the political figures they dislike.

"Donald Rumsfeld, for example, is cited almost exclusively by liberal bloggers, while Michael Moore is ignored by the left but widely cited by the right."

Jay Rosen, in his response to my response to his posting on my post (or is it the other way around?), cites some comments by Columbia Journalism Review's Steve Lovelady:

"Lovelady -- formerly an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and Wall Street Journal -- said that in 40 years in the business he couldn't recall a single instance where the White House press corps ('defined as the guys 'n dolls who show up for the daily kabuki theater staged by McClellan or any of his predecessors') broke a major story. The whole thing has become absurd, he feels.

"'The assignment is a sure road to four years of mind-numbing stenography, which is not a role any of those present ever had in mind when they went into the craft in the first place. The whole elaborate and pointless minuet ceased to be useful decades ago; what no one has come up with is a satisfactory replacement that might actually produce ...... news !

"'Instead, we get frustrated reporters full of bluster and trying to appear macho by asking "questions" more appropriate for a prosecutor grilling a defendant on the witness stand -- knowing full well the query will be danced around, or answered with a robot-like reiteration of a talking point.'"

I wrote about the Hiawatha Bray incident in Boston the other day, and Jeff Jarvis has a different view:

"The Boston Globe ombudsperson -- and the critics who complained to her -- get it exactly wrong when they go after Globe tech reporter Hiawatha Bray for expressing his political opinions in comments on blogs.

"I say we should be celebrating his openness, his transparency, his honesty -- for now his critics are free to disagree with what he says and thinks -- not just what they think he thinks.

"Oh, I know that's a minority opinion -- even sometimes a reviled one -- in the halls of journalism. But I have come to believe that journalists' refusal to acknowledge that they are human and are citizens and have opinions is a sort of lie by omission and we have to find better ways to deal with it than gagging them. Journalists are in the business of uncovering truths, not covering them; journalists demand to know what everyone else in the world thinks, yet they hide their own thoughts. Isn't that a disservice to the public? For it does not allow the public to judge the messenger, as is their right.

"Now, of course, this leads to many sticky questions: Do you take someone who hates Bush and have her cover Bush? Do you take someone who admires Bush and have him cover Bush? Well, but doesn't that happen already? It's not that we're putting the opinionless on these beats; we're merely hiding their opinions.

"I'm not saying that a White House reporter should turn his or her reports into screeds or hosannas. It is still the job of a reporter to report the facts, to be fair, to be complete, to be accurate, to leave those opinions at the door and tell the story to the best of his or her ability. What I'm really suggesting is that it's fair to know that that reporter voted for Reagan one year and Clinton the next."

Anyone watching cable yesterday morning would have seen the breathless coverage, complete with countdown clocks, as Jacko raced to court after a stop in the hospital. The New York Post is on the case:

"A teen cancer survivor shocked jurors with graphic detail on how Michael Jackson allegedly molested him two years ago, ending a bizarre courtroom day that began with the pajama-clad Jacko nearly going to jail.

"A woozy Jackson arrived an hour and 37 minutes late for his kiddie sex-abuse trial dressed in pajama bottoms and a black dinner jacket, claiming he was suffering from back trouble.

"Judge Rodney Melville issued a warrant for Jackson's arrest before the eccentric singer limped into court -- and endured a painful day of damaging testimony."

The gory details follow.

Roger Simon is taking it easy for a semester at Harvard, but he came up with something I hadn't seen before:

"Shortly after Election Day, an anonymous e-mail began circulating around the nation:

"Not to worry. With the Blue States in hand, the Democrats have firm control of 80 percent of the world's fresh water, over 90 percent of our pineapple and lettuce, 93 percent of the artichoke production, 95 percent of American's export quality wines, 90 percent of all cheese production, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools, plus Stanford, Caltech and MIT. We can live simply but well.

"The Red States, on the other hand, now have to cope with 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, 100 percent of all Televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia. A high price to pay for controlling the presidency.

"There is something both vaguely amusing and vaguely alarming about this e-mail (comparing Southern Baptists to mosquitoes is certainly uncalled for) but it accepts as fact the notion there is a great divide in America, a gulf, a polarization, a Red State/Blue state division."

Simon goes on to question whether that's really true.

The best single line I've read about the Jacko case comes from Tina Brown: "Either Jackson is a complete lunatic who slept with young boys and didn't fondle them or he's a complete lunatic who slept with young boys and did."

And thanks to the NYT for telling us that the latest addition to the blog universe is Rosie O'Donnell. Sample entry: in the interest of truth i have removed 6 posts from folks with charming names and thoughtful remarks [such as] . . . "HEY BIG HEAD - YOU ARE SO FAT"

Now you know.