In this Associated Press article published yesterday online at U.S. News and World Report or this article posted yesterday on the Wall Street Journal Law Blog or for those of you fair and balanced kind of folk there is this story from Fox News online yesterday.
While the blogger in question represented herself and the person that she had opined about was declared NOT a public official. She apparently was found to have defamed the person and entity that she wrote/blogged about. However, the appeals court found errors in the lower court’s ruling. UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh when learning of the case offered to represent the blogger on appeal. Volokh said after the appeals courts ruling,
“It makes clear that bloggers have the same First Amendment rights as professional journalists,” he said. “There had been similar precedents before concerning advocacy groups, other writers and book authors. This follows a fairly well established chain of precedents. I believe it is the first federal appeals court level ruling that applies to bloggers.”
Maybe the condescending employees of news organizations will now come down off their high and mighty perch and accept citizen journalists. Just because someone takes to being a citizen journalists instead of accepting a check from a news organization or even a free lance aka “stringer” job doesn’t put them on some superior level of journalism.
