As Media Evolves, Hill Tries To Define It
My colleague Winter Casey reports at NationalJournal.com...
Speaking at a Center for Democracy and Technology gala last week, Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., predicted that federal shield legislation he introduced in February would pass the House and Senate this session. The bill, H.R. 985, would protect reporters from being compelled to reveal confidential sources even under subpoena. It currently has 40 cosponsors, including Reps. Mike Pence, R-Ind., John Conyers, D-Mich., and Bob Goodlatte, R-Va. An identical bill passed the House during the 110th Congress, but the Senate never considered it.
In order to protect journalists, however, someone first has to decide who qualifies -- no easy task in the fast-evolving new media marketplace. Boucher's office noted that 36 states and the District of Columbia already have statutes protecting reporters, but the laws use varying standards and some require journalists to work for a newspaper or a radio or television station. "We have to be very careful of enshrining in legislation today a view of technology that doesn't take into account that technology changes," said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. "We are also faced with the situation today when journalism and journalism institutions are undergoing tremendous change, and the way we have defined who is a journalist" is changing as well, he added.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for example, this week stopped printing a paper edition and is available only via the Web. President Barack Obama, in his first news conference from the White House, took a question from a reporter for the Huffington Post, an online-only source of liberal-leaning news that also routinely publishes stories written by celebrities and notable politicos. Under some laws, reporters from neither publication would qualify for protection. Read the full story here.
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