Not only does it put one class of citizen outside the requirements of the law, it also excludes everyone but a small class of citizens from the protections of a part of the Bill of Rights.

In 1972, in the U.S. Supreme Court case, Branzburg v. Hayes, which said there was no “news media privilege” on sources in federal courts, Justice Byron White conceded the difficulty of specifying who is a journalist. White wrote that arriving at such a definition would be “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 the large metropolitan publisher.”
Fast-forward Justice White’s concerns to 2009 and he may well have added “… and the blogger sitting at home using a computer and the World Wide Web.” But that’s not where the law stands in Congress.
The House already has passed its version of a shield law. It defines a journalist as (take a deep breath here if reading aloud): “A person who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes news and information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public, for a substantial portion of the person’s livelihood, or for substantial financial gain.”

Got that – instead of Congress protecting the right of every American to the freedoms of the First Amendment, Congress is looking to define most Americans out of the protections of granted under the rubric of freedom of the press. After all, if only journalists are to be considered a part of the press for purposes of federal law, it will become axiomatic that other aspects of freedom of the press are applicable only to that small class of individuals when we have a judiciary that constantly attempts to discern not the original intent of the Constitutioon, but instead the meaning of a “living constitution” that is untethered to the original meaning of the text.

Posted by: Greg at 11:07 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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