Author Archives: Sarah Baker

Gawker Fingers a Democrat as Lena Dunham’s Alleged Rapist

Gawker reporter J.K. Trotter has revealed the real name of a real human being who Trotter hypothesizes might really have raped Lena Dunham, as she described in Not That Kind of Girl. I think he was wrong to do so and will not repeat it here, or link to the article.

Suffice to say that Gawker previously obtained a copy of the book proposal Dunham submitted to her publisher. The identifying details set forth in the proposal were different than the details included in the published book. Using a combination of both, Trotter was able to identify a former Oberlin student who could be the person described.

That person, however, is not a Republican or a conservative, but a registered Democrat. I confess to finding this discrepancy interesting. Dunham called her alleged rapist “a mustachioed campus Republican” and “the campus’s resident conservative.” I interpreted her repetition of that detail, as it was reported in the media, as intending her audience to make some connection between the young man’s party affiliation and his alleged conduct—and to generalize that conduct toward others who share the affiliation.

Perhaps I was mistaken to assume that Dunham or her supporters harbored such an intent. Perhaps changing this detail might simply have been an effective and innocuous way to obscure the man’s identity. I cannot know. Regardless, of whatever interest it may be, it does not justify naming an actual person who may be guilty of nothing more than serving as source material for a composite character.

Have we learned nothing from the UVA rape story?

Dunham and her publisher have already had to apologize—weeks after he had been identified—to an identifiable campus conservative named Barry (the name Dunham used in her book). Why drag yet another person, presumed innocent in the absence of a conviction, into this?

By Trotter’s own admission, the motivation is to push back against “right-wing” questions about Dunham’s story:

Following the clues in the published text, Dunham’s antagonists have declared that the rape story is a hoax, one that falsely implicates a fellow student. The investigation has led Dunham’s publisher to announce a revision to future editions of the book—confirmation, to her foes, that she is lying, and that her alleged rapist doesn’t exist.

Most mainstream outlets have covered the details of the case with trepidation, if they cover them at all, allowing the central claims of the right-wing account to stand unchallenged. But the investigators aren’t just distasteful. They’re wrong.

In other words, Trotter has an agenda. He wants to exonerate Dunham from suggestions that she fabricated her story, even if that means convicting someone else of rape.

What qualifies Trotter to make this determination? Is he a judge? A lawyer? A sworn juror, having viewed the credibility of the witnesses on the stand and been instructed with the governing law? Was the accused given a defense, an opportunity to cross-examine the witnesses against him, and access to exculpatory evidence?

If Rolling Stone’s infamous UVA rape story has taught us anything, it is that people sometimes lie. They lie about unpredictable things and for unpredictable reasons. Their reasons for doing so are as many and myriad as they are. To insist that women never lie about rape—or at least not often enough to matter—is to reject the range and variability of the experience of being female.

This is not to say that Lena Dunham is lying.

Unlike the person named in Trotter’s article, she laid her story out for public scrutiny and made a lot of money in the process. She injected politics into it—wittingly or not—by focusing attention on the man’s party affiliation. She took her time clearing the name of the identifiable campus conservative whose name matched the one used in her book.

Nevertheless, she deserves the same presumption of innocence as the person named in Trotter’s article. Dunham made a clear effort—based on Trotter’s own reporting—to protect the identity of the person she alleges raped her. She made an unequivocal (albeit slow coming) statement clearing the name of the man others had previously identified. She is entitled to write a memoir that is based on true events or that uses composite characters.

I am in no more position to judge her false than Trotter is in position to name someone a rapist as part of a quest to exonerate Dunham against “right-wing” challenges. His doing so, for that stated reason, is not journalism. It is trauma advocacy and cultural arbitration, at the price of a fellow human being.

Sarah Baker is a libertarian, attorney and writer. She lives in Montana with her daughter and a house full of pets.

A Christmas Without Spying

Sheriff Elf“When parents and teachers bring The Elf on the Shelf into homes and classrooms, are they preparing a generation of children to accept, not question, increasingly intrusive (albeit whimsically packaged) modes of surveillance?” ask Laura Elizabeth Pinto and Selena Nemorin in an essay for the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives this December.

Dr. Pinto is a digital technology professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. Dr. Nemorin is a post-doctoral fellow at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. In their column, the two observe that interactive, imaginary play is how children learn to “make sense of their world, their place in society, … their identity, and what is right and wrong.”

But Elf on the Shelf is not interactive. Rather, it is a one-sided, authoritarian intrusion of imaginative “play” (if you can call it that) into the child’s real life:

[I]n other games, the child role-plays a character, or the child imagines herself within a play-world of the game, but the role play does not enter the child’s real world as part of the game. As well, in most games, the time of play is delineated (while the game goes on), and the play to which the rules apply typically does not overlap with the child’s real world.

 

Elf on the Shelf presents a unique (and prescriptive) form of play that blurs the distinction between play time and real life. Children who participate in play with The Elf on the Shelf doll have to contend with rules at all times during the day: they may not touch the doll, and they must accept that the doll watches them at all times with the purpose of reporting to Santa Claus. This is different from more conventional play with dolls, where children create play-worlds born of their imagination, moving dolls and determining interactions with other people and other dolls. Rather, the hands-off “play” demanded by the elf is limited to finding (but not touching!) The Elf on the Shelf every morning, and acquiescing to surveillance during waking hours under the elf’s watchful eye. The Elf on the Shelf controls all parameters of play, who can do and touch what, and ultimately attempts to dictate the child’s behavior outside of time used for play.

The gaze of the elf on the child’s real world (as opposed to play world) resonates with the purpose of the panopticon, based on Jeremy Bentham’s 18th century design for a model prison (a central tower in a circular structure, surrounded by cells).

Anthony L. Fisher writing at Reason connects the point Pinto and Nemorin are making about the Elf of the Shelf—the “creepy side-eyed gnome [who] has spied and informed on millions of kids to an unaccountable power broker at the North Pole—to the “Stasi-meets-stalker lyrics” of Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.

It is the sort of thing that makes people roll their eyes at libertarians. But consider my own experience.

“Mom, why does Santa Claus think it’s bad when kids cry?” my daughter asked a couple of weeks ago.

“Hmmm… Well…. Sometimes it can be annoying when kids are crying or being whiny and no one else can talk because the kid is taking all the attention.”

Not my proudest moment as a parent, I confess. We were in the car, the roads were slick, and I was distracted.

I was fixated on my “Santa Dilemma.” I have truthfully answered every hard question my kid has asked: how babies are made; why her parents do not live together; about religion and death.

The last one was the hardest.

But I have told vast lies about Santa, manufactured complex, extensive secondary lies in support of the claim that such a being exists. Now she is old enough to recognize that Santa’s existence is inconsistent with everything else she knows of the world; to analyze the available “evidence” for Santa, for flying reindeer, elves, a village located at the North Pole, and for Mrs. Claus.

If she asked me flat out, I would confess everything. But all she does is probe around the edges, and I cannot bring myself to utter the words.

I made it all up.

The gnawing guilt over whether I am making the right choice between destroying the magic or allowing the magnitude of betrayal to grow with each passing year got in the way of my hearing the question behind the question.

Why does Santa Claus think it’s bad to cry?

Two days later, I got it.

“Mom, if you get on the bad list, do you stay on it forever, or is it just for that year?”

My daughter’s voice was tremulous and thick with emotion. We were in the car again, on the same slick roads. But all at once, it hit me.

When she cries, it is usually over something real, something that merits tears. Someone stopped being her friend at school. Or she misses someone in her family.

Why indeed would Santa think that’s “bad?” Who is Santa to decide?

This is not a concept I have taught her. We have no “naughty and nice” lists. Our Elf gets played with like a doll. He never spies or tattles. Yet somehow my daughter has picked up on the concept.

I shut it down.

“I know some of the songs talk about that. Or maybe your friends at school talk about it. But Santa Claus does not do that in our family. We don’t have naughty and nice lists. All the kids in our family are on the nice list because all the grownups love them no matter what. Those songs are just silly things people say. It does not work that way in our family.”

As Pinto and Nemorin observe:

Under normal circumstances, children’s behaviour (i.e., what is “naughty” and what is “nice”) is situated in social contexts and mediated by human beings (peers, parents, and teachers) where the child conceptualizes actions and emotions in relation to other people and how they feel.

 

Through play, children become aware about others’ perspectives: in other words, they cultivate understandings about social relationships. The Elf on the Shelf essentially teaches the child to accept an external form of non-familial surveillance in the home when the elf becomes the source of power and judgment, based on a set of rules attributable to Santa Claus.

… Broadly speaking, The Elf on the Shelf serves functions that are aligned to the official functions of the panopticon. In doing so, it contributes to the shaping of children as governable subjects.

Christmas listBefore a certain age, children’s behavior is either genetic or it is learned from their environment. Manipulating them with an omniscient, omnipotent “daddy” overseer—a god-power with a jolly laugh and a bag full of rewards for conformance—is just passing the buck.

I prefer to let my daughter learn right and wrong by interacting with real people, not under threats from imaginary spies. I prefer to let her enjoy the magic of the season.

Sarah Baker is a libertarian, attorney and writer. She lives in Montana with her daughter and a house full of pets.

American Kim Jong Un’s Try to Silence Speech Every Day

joke braIt should come as no surprise that a petty little foreign dictator is trying to silence speech he finds offensive using threats of violence. Here in the United States, we have our own homegrown petty dictators doing their best to suppress speech they dislike every day. Like Kim, their refusal or inability to simply state their disagreement persuasively reveals them as the petulant, tyrannical little egomaniacs they are.

Preliminarily, let us dispose of the erroneous notion that there are any Constitutional implications to this issue, a confusion resulting from the sloppy substitution of the term “free speech” for the actual text of the First Amendment. Sony Picture’s difficulties do not stem from any legislative action of a U.S. government body. Sony’s rights under U.S. law to make and distribute The Interview are not in question. Sony’s difficulties arise from actions taken by hackers, perhaps connected to Pyongyang.

The First Amendment acts as a restriction on legislative action by U.S. government bodies. It does not restrict the private actions of businesses, churches, employers, property owners, criminal hackers, or petulant foreign tyrants. Hacking emails and making threats are crimes. Sony and the theater chains have the right to be protected from criminal acts. Those rights do not stem from the First Amendment.

But just because private action to suppress speech is permitted, that does not make it desirable. Nevertheless, homegrown tyrants in the U.S. increasingly resort to silencing, rather than simply persuasively voicing their disagreement with speech they find offensive.

Consider the recent case of Omar Mahmood.

Mahmood is a student at the University of Michigan. There he penned a column for the university’s conservative alternative newspaper, The Michigan Review. The essay was intended as satire mocking political correctness, victim identity politics, and “trigger warnings.”

It was called “Do the Left Thing” and accompanied by an all-caps “TRIGGER WARNING!” In the piece, Mahmood talks about “microaggressions” against left “handydnyss,” including one incident where he slipped in white-privilege snow, put out his left hand to catch himself, and was offered assistance by a white, cis-gendered m@n. In that moment, Mahmood begins to think “intersectionally” about what it is to be a left-handyd individu@l. He spurns the right-hand of assistance and the other man calls out, “I was just trying to do the right thing!” Mahmood has an epiphany about the right-handed privilege behind the words “right thing” and how the word sinister originally meant left-handed. He closes by urging people to do the “left thing” (which might be a double entendre of sorts). Read the whole thing here.

The column, as noted, ran in the conservative Michigan Review. But Mahmood was also a writer at another campus paper called The Michigan Daily. A writer at The Daily claimed to feel “threatened” by the piece. Mahmood was asked to apologize. He refused.

Shortly thereafter, he was fired based on a provision in The Daily’s bylaws that prevents students who work at The Review from also writing for The Daily unless they obtain prior permission from The Daily’s editor-in-chief. Of course, some people have speculated that Mahmood was not really fired for violating the bylaws, but rather for writing a column deemed offensive. Either way, there are no First Amendment implications. The Daily can fire writers for any reason or none at all.

But why does it want to? Why this need to punish people rather than respond to ideas? Whither this seemingly growing compulsion, not just to disagree, but to suppress and silence all speech deemed offensive?

The breadth of the problem is highlighted by what happened to Mahmood next. His off-campus apartment was vandalized with eggs, hot dogs and pictures of Satan. The aggressors printed copies of “Do the Left Thing” and left them at his door with hateful messages scrawled across: “Everyone hates you, you violent fuck;” “Shut the fuck up;” and “Do you even go here? Leave.”

image OmarDoor

Mahmood now says he wonders if he would do it all over again.

“There are times when I say to myself, ‘Hell yes, I should have written that!'” he said. “And there are times when it’s like, never in my dreams would I write it again, given the reaction I have had to deal with.”

I’ve got a whole list of triggers (though I require no warnings): group think, identity politics, collectivism, racism, statism, theocracy, the claim that women in the United States of America are persecuted, the claim that Christians in the United States of America are persecuted, Keynesian economics and Anita Sarkeesian, to name but a few.

But I never, ever feel compelled to silence the people with whom I disagree. At most, I would be satisfied with keeping their speech out of my home and my business and off my private property. I have no compulsion to make it cease existing. I am happy to simply state my disagreement, and to prove them wrong with words, logic and evidence.

Silencing is the tactic of people who are insecure in their own arguments—or incapable of making them at all. They merit no more respect for their terrorist tactics that Kim Jong Un does for his.

Sarah Baker is a libertarian, attorney and writer. She lives in Montana with her daughter and a house full of pets.

Rectal Rehydration, Death by Hypothermia and “Enhanced Interrogation” of the Illegally Detained: Agency Gone Rogue or Approved by the Administration?

Did the White House approve the conduct set forth in the CIA Torture Report? Or did the CIA engage in that conduct without the approval of any political branch of government?

The question is not merely academic.

If the CIA’s conduct was not approved by elected officials who answer to the voters, then to whom does the CIA answer? If the CIA’s conduct was approved, then the voters need to know by whom so they can cast future votes with full understanding of what is at stake.

By now we have had time to digest the disturbing details in all their infamy: the rectal “feedings,” the ice baths and sleep deprivation; the death of Gul Rahman; the forced placement of body weight on broken limbs; sensory deprivation so intense it lead to self-mutilation and hallucinations; and, the mistaken identifications, false accusations and simple negligence that lead to the illegal detention of 26 human beings and “enhanced interrogation” of our own intelligence sources.

Rather I should say all of us have heard those details now except for Dick Cheney. Or at least he had not heard of them last week, when he sat down with Fox New’s Bret Baier.

As scathingly detailed by Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic, Dick Cheney is trying to have his torture cake and eat it too. When Baier asked whether it was true that “President Bush was not fully briefed on the program and deliberately kept in the dark by the CIA,” Cheney was unequivocal in his response:

The notion that … somehow the agency was operating on a rogue basis and that we weren’t being told or that the President wasn’t being told is just a flat out lie.

Later in the interview, Cheney reiterated that:

The men and women of the CIA did exactly what we wanted to have them do in terms of taking on this program.

All right then. The CIA was doing exactly what Bush and Cheney wanted when its operatives injected pureed food into the anuses of detainees. The CIA was doing exactly what Bush and Cheney wanted when its operatives left a man half-naked man chained to the floor in a frigid cell.

Only Cheney is either a coward or he does not actually know what he is talking about, because later in the interview he retreats to what appears to be an inconsistent position. As noted by Friedersdorf:

… Baier notes a particularly depraved tactic. “At one point, this report describes interrogators pureeing food of one detainee and then serving it in his anus,” he says, “something the agency called ‘rectal rehydration.’ I mean, is that torture?” (More to the point, did Bush and Cheney know about that? Is it “exactly” what they asked the CIA to do?)

“I don’t know anything about that specific instance,” Cheney said. “I can’t speak to that. … “

Cheney cannot have it both ways. If he wants to be the face of the defense for the enhanced interrogation program, he should own it. If he is not willing to own it, in all its gory particulars, then he cannot really present a meaningful defense. Either the administration approved the conduct described in the report—or the CIA acted without the approval or knowledge of the political branches tasked with overseeing that agency on the people’s behalf. That the CIA was trying to prevent future attacks is not related in any logical way to which of those things is true.

Cheney’s tactic throughout the interview is to avoid being pressed on this issue by: 1) extolling the praises of the CIA for doing exactly as Cheney and Bush wanted ; 2) denying knowledge of any of the troubling accusations contained in the torture report; and, 3) then getting emotional and bringing up 9/11.

Consider the following examples.

Baier asks Cheney whether Bush was comfortable with leaving a man chained to the ceiling in a diaper to urinate and defecate on himself. Cheney responds:

I have no idea. I never heard of any such thing.

If Cheney does not know the details, why is he giving interviews? Why should anyone take his word about any of it? That is the topic at hand, sir!

Baier raises the issue of Gul Rahman, who died of hypothermia shackled naked from the waist down to a freezing cement floor in a frigid cell:

Three thousand Americans died on 9/11 because of what these guys did. And I have no sympathy for them.

There is a missing link in the logic here. Even if we assume there are people so bad that we can sleep with unfettered consciences while our CIA tortures them to death, what is the evidence Gul Rahman was one of them?

Rahman was not captured on a battlefield, like enemy combatants of yore. To the contrary, Associated Press reporting states that:

Rahman had driven from Peshawar, Pakistan, in the northwest frontier to Islamabad for a medical checkup. He was staying with Baheer, an old friend, when U.S. agents and Pakistani security forces stormed the house and took both men, two guards and a cook into custody.

In fact, in addition to this Gul Rahman, who died in CIA custody, the CIA apparently kept a different Gul Rahman in isolation for a month because its operatives were confused about which Gul Rahman was the target (page 133/499 of the Committee report).

At least 26 people were found to have been improperly detained. Two of our own intelligence sources were subjected to enhanced interrogation. Tortured detainees gave information that falsely implicated others. One man provided false intelligence under torture that was used in Colin Powell’s address to the UN in advance of the Iraq War.

Dick Cheney is not troubled by these details.

On Meet the Press this past Sunday, he gave yet another interview, in which he disavows any problems with the detention of innocent people. He also disavows any qualms over the death of Gul Rahman, despite appearing to agree that the wrong Gul Rahman ended up frozen to death:

CHUCK TODD:

Let me ask you, what do you say to Gul Rahman, what do you say to Sulaiman Abdula, what do you say to Khalid al-Masri? All three of these folks were detained, they had these interrogation techniques used on them. They eventually were found to be innocent. They were released, no apologies, nothing. What do we owe them?

DICK CHENEY: Well—

CHUCK TODD: I mean, let me go to Gul Rahman. He was chained to the wall of his cell, doused with water, froze to death in C.I.A. custody. And it turned out it was a case of mistaken identity.

DICK CHENEY: —Right. But the problem I had is with the folks that we did release that end up back on the battlefield. …

CHUCK TODD: 25% of the detainees though, 25% turned out to be innocent. They were released.

DICK CHENEY: Where are you going to draw the line, Chuck? How are—

CHUCK TODD: Well, I’m asking you.

DICK CHENEY: —you going to know?

(OVERTALK)

CHUCK TODD: Is that too high? You’re okay with that margin for error?

DICK CHENEY: I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective. And our objective is to get the guys who did 9/11 and it is to avoid another attack against the United States.

But Cheney did not offer any evidence that “enhanced interrogation” prevented other attacks. He cited without elaboration to the “West Coast” “Second Wave” plot. But that claim was debunked in the CIA Torture Report based on information provided to the Committee by the CIA itself. If the Torture Report is wrong or incomplete on this issue, Cheney needed to tell us why.

Baier challenged him by repeating a claim made on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Mark Udall that the classified Panetta Review found no “direct linkage” between enhanced interrogation techniques and thwarting any attacks. As chronicled by Friedersdorf:

Here is Cheney’s actual retort:

“Well, I don’t know where he was on 9/11, but he wasn’t in the bunker.”

That is a non-answer.

A U.S. Senator who has seen the documents said on the floor of the U.S. Senate that Leon Panetta found no direct link between enhanced interrogation and thwarted attacks—and Dick Cheney’s response is, “Well he wasn’t in the bunker with us?”

The American people deserve more.

Their defenders deserve more.

What is lost in Cheney’s chest pounding is a meaningful reflection on why, beyond principles, civilized nations disavow torture. It is done for the same practical reasons that, for thousands of years, enemies have agreed to return bodies, to ensure last rites, to grant quick deaths or to refrain from persecuting surviving family members.

Because they want to make sure their own people get the same consideration.

What have we done for so little gain?

Sarah Baker is a libertarian, attorney and writer. She lives in Montana with her daughter and a house full of pets.

No Publius in the Alabama Senate Press Room

Del MarshDel Marsh, R-Anniston, president pro tempore of the Alabama Senate, has asked the Alabama Press Association to assist Senate staff “in determining a proper definition of what constitutes a journalist meriting access to the press room.” Senator Marsh only wants real “journalists” in the press rooms. The others—“partisan political blogs and shady fly-by-night websites offering purposely skewed and inaccurate interpretations of hard news events”—can “sit in the public gallery and blog about what they see” from there.

One wonders, if the access in the gallery is commensurate with the access in the press room, what difference does it make? On the other hand, if the access is not commensurate, then why is Senator Marsh seeking to relegate some of his citizens to second class access based on a distinction even he cannot articulate?

Luckily for him—and the Alabama Press Association—the U.S. Supreme Court has already made it simple to determine who possesses the freedom of the press.

Everyone.

“The press” refers not to a group of people, but to the action of publication itself. Thus, “freedom of the press” protects not a privileged group of actors, but the action of conveying information and ideas, wherever that action is undertaken, by whatever means and whatever person. The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized as much:

The press, in its historic connotation, comprehends every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion.

Lovell v. City of Griffin, 303 U.S. 444, 452 (1938) (protecting Jehovah’s Witness’s right to distribute religious leaflets door-to-door without a license).

The administration of a constitutional newsman’s privilege would present practical and conceptual difficulties of a high order. Sooner or later, it would be necessary to define those categories of newsmen who qualified for the privilege, 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 of the large metropolitan publisher who utilizes the latest photocomposition methods. Freedom of the press is a “fundamental personal right“… The informative function asserted by representatives of the organized press … is also performed by lecturers, political pollsters, novelists, academic researchers, and dramatists.

Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665, 703-05 (1972) (emphasis added, internal citations removed) (like every other citizen, a reporter can be called to answer before grand jury).

[T]he purpose of the Constitution was not to erect the press into a privileged institution, but to protect all persons in their right to print what they will as well as to utter it. “[T]he liberty of the press is no greater and no less than the liberty of every subject of the Queen,” and, in the United States, it is no greater than the liberty of every citizen of the Republic.

Pennekamp v. Florida, 328 U.S. 331, 364 (1946) (emphasis added, internal citations removed) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).

Is it too idealistic to think that something called a “press room” should be open to all the people who possess the “freedom of the press,” which is to say everyone?

Perhaps.

Surely, the general public cannot demand admission to White House press briefings. And Marsh would say he is not proposing to restrict the act of publishing, but rather the act of entering the press room. The former is a constitutional right; the latter (Marsh would argue) is a special privilege.

The distinction is not without meaning, as Doug Mataconis has comprehensively explained. Just as federal and state governments can grant special privileges for religious beliefs without running afoul of the First Amendment, so too can they grant extra-Constitutional privileges, such as testimonial shield laws, to only certain members of the media.

When expanding protection, legislatures are entitled to draw lines that might not be permissible in the case of abridgements.

*     *     *

Because press shield legislation would extend immunities to the press beyond what the First Amendment has been held to require, it probably does not violate the Constitution to confine those immunities to a subset of entities entitled to protection under the Press Clause.

Michael W. McConnell, Reconsidering Citizens United as a Press Clause Case, 123 Yale L. J. 266 (Nov. 2013).

Marsh might seek to characterize his proposal, not as an infringement upon freedom of the press, but a special perk akin to a media shield law for favored groups in their exercise of that right. That might be constitutional.

But it is also bad policy.

Its practical unworkability is evidenced by other efforts to establish criteria for the receipt of such special perks. Such criteria inevitably focus on the regularity and primacy of the journalistic activity to that individual or entity and whether that activity constitutes a business endeavor for financial gain or livelihood.

As former Circuit Judge for the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School Michael W. McConnell has observed, those standards risk excluding publications like The National Review, The Weekly Standard, Slate and Newsweek, which are sometimes kept afloat by donors rather than profits. They risk excluding the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian, and the American Bar Association, which engage in journalism as secondary to other endeavors. And they risk excluding authors, documentary filmmakers, and pamphleteers, who do not follow any predetermined cycle to their publishing.

Senator Marsh would do well to remember, also, what Doug Mataconis observed:

[I]t was a bunch of bloggers who discovered that the memos that CBS News relied upon to support its story about George W. Bush supposedly ducking out early on his National Guard commitments were forgeries. That report, you’ll recall, came out at the height of the 2004 re-election campaign and threatened to have a major impact on the election. Instead [thanks to those bloggers], it ended up having a major impact on the careers of several CBS News employees, including a man who had been anchoring the CBS Evening News for more than 20 years. For reasons like that, it’s important that we make sure that shield laws don’t end up being something that only cover members of what essentially amounts to a protected cartel while bloggers and free-lancers are left out.

Under Senator Marsh’s approach, “real” journalists like Dan Rather would no doubt gain admission to the Alabama legislature’s press rooms. What about the bloggers who uncovered the problems with Rather’s documents?

PubliusIt is not always clear, based on mainstream status, who is the partisan, shady, fly-by-night imposter “offering purposely skewed and inaccurate interpretations of hard news events” and who is engaged in real journalism. Senator Marsh should reconsider his efforts to impose press credentialing standards that Thomas Paine, Publius, and the Federal Farmer would be unable to satisfy.

 

 

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Lady Liberty image via The Montgomery Advertiser. Publius image from FeedBooks.com.

Sarah Baker is a libertarian, attorney and writer. She lives in Montana with her daughter and a house full of pets.
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