I confess to having a tremendous amount of trouble with this paper. I see literally no Constitutional language, history, cases, or even common sense interpretation that supports the idea that the subjective intent behind a piece of writing (i.e. whether it is considered "reporting" or not by its author) determines the type of First Amendment protection it should be afforded. You suggest that: "A blogger who does not set out to report on the news, but happens to witness a tornado and reports it, gets no special cover if that report becomes the subject of court inquiry." I fail to see how the blogger's conception of himself as reporter or accidental witness should at all determine the level of Constitutional protection accorded to his speech. (Pragmatically speaking, wouldn't this subjective inquiry be easy to fool? If called upon by a court to reveal that which a "journalist" in your paradigm would not have to produce, couldn't this hypothetical reporter simply lie, saying that he indeed set out to report?)

The essay suggests that there would accordingly be a trade-off between lessened protection by certain laws and increased protection against libel suits for those not considered Press. But this confuses the issue: Though I am not a libel law expert by any stretch, my reading of the cases indicates that "ordinary people" (those plebian bloggers this essay refers to) are already subject to libel laws, though certainly the relative harm/reward of suing someone about libelous Facebook postings versus, say, the New York Times, make such suits less likely. (I do note, however, that it seems this state of affairs may be reversing itself. The death of the old media seems to be now inevitable, making the distinctions this essay proposes moot as well as quite probably wrong). Why, then, if we are already subject to the strictures of publication should we be denied its protections?

On a final note, though I suppose we are not obliged to address Eben's arguments in our essays, it seems to me that this essay can't avoid discussing the idea Eben proposed to us in class--- that the Press is not people, the Press is the machine. It is the machine that the First Amendment frees, and so accordingly, he who controls the machine (in the new age, all of us) is as free as any other man to speak. It seems faintly ridiculous, given this suggestion, to imagine that the writers of our Constitution had anything other in mind than the printing press when they laid down this clause; it is even more ridiculous, I think, to imagine that the Constitution can support the sort of subjective and self-serving distinctions that this essay proposes.

-- DanaDelger - 22 Mar 2009