Of course the sticky wicket is that if there are no rules as to who can be defined as ‘news media’, then there is no way to distinguished who can sit in on the meeting and who can’t. Clearly the original rule was intended to discriminate on who could attend and who couldn’t, so they clearly had a class of people (general or specific) in mind. Clearly…
State legislators who devised the statute in the 1970s never anticipated the Internet and its empowerment of individuals to blog or disseminate news from their personal keyboards.
So here are the criteria for ‘news media’ that they are considering:
Regular reporting on the Lake Oswego City Council
Multiple personnel with defined roles
Registration with the state Corporation Division
Reporting “conducted continuously (at least weekly) and permanently”
Publications or broadcasts that include “at least 25 percent news content”
Media representatives would be allowed to attend executive sessions if they provide evidence that includes “proof satisfactory to the City Council that the person is gathering news,” along with a press badge, a recently published news article with their byline or an editor’s note on letterhead.
Predictably, the definition they are considering has made many people object, and not just bloggers:
The wording of Lake Oswego’s draft policy focuses mostly on traditional media organizations and ignores the growing value of bloggers, said Kyu Ho Youm, a journalism professor and First Amendment expert at the University of Oregon.
At least they are aware of the potential implications of their proposed rule:
David Powell, the city attorney, said he expects to change parts of the policy after hearing from media groups.
A while back (almost a year ago I think), I remember seeing a journalism professor (I think… or he may have been a 1st amendment lawyer) make a convincing case that setting some criteria down wouldn’t be all bad, but would be a trade-off with a compelling upside. I wish I could find the link (spent a while looking but no luck).
So what do you think? Should there be standards for defining ‘the news media’? Who should be able to set them? Is it right for the government to grant ‘legitimacy’ to some media and not others?
has a history of covering town news, it should be able to attend any town meeting, at least in the same way other media could.
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p>If it was a blog covering grandma’s favorite recipes, or was just created 10 minutes ago, then maybe there’d be a point. However, not many of those bloggers are going to be interested in attending the executive session of the finance committee, anyway.
A basic principle of First Amendment law is that the news media have no more rights than any member of the public.
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p>There are certain instances – such as high-profile trials – where it makes sense to reserve some seats for credentialed journalists, because you couldn’t let 5,000 members of the public in. In those cases, journalists are stand-ins for the public.
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p>But the Oregon law strikes me as offensive to the notion that journalists have no special rights. Repeal it, says I.
… with provisions that pivot on the term ‘the news media’ are to be rendered meaningless on their face?
Interesting. What do you think of the “shield” debate, whereby journalists would be allowed to withhold their sources from criminal or other investigations? That right at the moment doesn’t exist under the First Amendment, according to most courts to have considered the issue, but some argue that it should, and there are states that have created it statutorily. That certainly seems like a right that the average member of the public who happened to be in possession of information about a crime would not have.
I think shield laws ought to protect journalism as an activity, not journalists as a class. There ought to be some way of defining journalism such that a judge could make a factual determination as to whether the activity should be protected or not.
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p>But yeah, I would object to any law that provides more protection to a reporter for the New York Times than to a lone blogger, as long as the blogger is doing something recognizably journalistic.
… define the activity, isn’t it then simple to define a journalist as ‘one who engages in’ that activity? If Journalists can be so defined, is there really a distinction between a policy salient to the activity vs. salient toward the people who ‘do’ the activity?
Calling bloggers “journalists” scares the mainstream press.
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p>They’ll start calling for blogger ethics panels again! (Wow, haven’t pulled THAT joke out in a while!)
There are shield laws on the books in some states that define journalists as press-card-carrying staff members of newspapers and other media organizations. And if you fall outside that definition, you receive no shield-law protection. That’s why it’s important to focus on the activity rather than the person.
Problem solved.
Has that been tried anywhere else? How could it work, knowing that some sessions require the discussion of sensitive and/or privileged information?
is that media can sit in on executive sessions.
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p>Can anyone imagine ol’ Campy sitting in on Lowell city council exec sessions?? Oh wait, he winds up with the information in violation of the law anyway…
In 1986 I sat in on jury selection for the Woburn toxic-waste trial. Judge Walter Jay Skinner ruled that the media could attend private questioning of prospective jurors on the condition that they not report on it until after the jury had been seated.
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p>I was covering the trial for the Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn. My editor and I decided to go along with Skinner’s conditions, and I got a pretty interesting story out of it after the fact.
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p>The Boston Globe and Boston Herald protested and file some sort of complaint against Skinner, so I was the only reporter in there. I’m agnostic as to whether Skinner should have handled it that way, but it would be interesting today to see whether any independent bloggers wanted to sit in as well.
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p>Still, I suspect only a credentialed reporter could afford to do it – after all, I was getting paid to be there, hour after hour, day after day.