Thursday, February 14, 2008
Blogs and Press Rights
A "scoop" raises questions about First Amendment protection.
Posted by John Branston on Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 4:00 AM
How interesting that The Commercial Appeal has jumped to the defense of blogger Thaddeus Matthews, who is, according to a CA editorial, "among a growing cadre of Internet savvy communicators who are using the Internet to democratize journalism."
Such broad-mindedness! Such generosity! No doubt the CA will write the first check for the Matthews Legal Defense Fund, if and when Shelby County district attorney general Bill Gibbons subpoenas Matthews and, if he balks, asks a judge to throw him in jail for undermining the investigation of the murder of Memphis police lieutenant Ed Vidulich.
If Matthews decides to stonewall rather than give up the name of the person who gave him a transcript of an initial interview with suspect Dexter Cox, maybe CA editorial writers will join him at 201 Poplar in the name of the First Amendment. And if, a year or two from now, Cox gets out of jail because a judge or jury reluctantly decides that his case was hopelessly contaminated in the first 48 hours, maybe they'll give him a job. Otherwise, they're just blowing high-toned smoke.
This embrace of freelance bloggers, mind you, comes from the same newspaper that has cut back on reporters and offered its salaried staff part-time jobs as delivery persons in the brave new world of daily print journalism.
Matthews is the main author and founder of thaddeusmatthews.com. See for yourself what Cox said about Vidulich in his statement to detectives. The CA didn't print the "sexually explicit" details, and I won't either. The cops say initial statements from suspects in murder investigations are sometimes true and sometimes lies and often a mixture of the two, and I believe them. Before there is a formal charge and indictments that will stand up in court, there are more interviews, more witnesses, and more gathering of evidence.
Criminal defense lawyers get paid to shoot holes in weak cases. Arrest tickets, indictments, and trials are public, but much of the investigation process is not. Gibbons and police director Larry Godwin have argued that the initial interview of Cox by detectives is not public information and that its release could jeopardize the case. The CA says Matthews was "using a common journalistic tool."
Oh? I can't recall another prominent Memphis murder case where someone leaked an initial statement and it got such widespread media attention. It may have happened, but I don't recall it in 25 years. I know this much. Reporters write many versions or "drafts" of their stories before submitting them to editors, who refine them some more. I don't know any reporter who would defend the First Amendment right of a blogger to publish their notes or first draft of a story if it was taken off their computer (as is quite possible) and forwarded to someone else. It's hard enough to get mainstream papers to comment on their published stories, internal policies, and business operations. Not an exact parallel to the Vidulich case but close enough.
The same courtesy should be extended to the cops, so they can catch bad guys and lock them up. Kinky stuff happens. Cops break the law. Innocent people get questioned, charged, and convicted. The process is imperfect, but it's better than no process at all. You publish anonymous accusations and unsupported claims at your peril. You only have to be wrong in a big way or libel someone once to lose your credibility and even your job in the stodgy, old-fashioned world of "established media" that the stalwart CA editorial writers blithely lump together with the anything-goes world of thaddeusmatthews.com.
Flawed, lazy, beaten, battered, scooped, and insular it may sometimes be, but the established media still has some merits. Rules, principles, editing, attribution, corrections, and professionalism — not to mention regular salaries — still mean something. Blogs vary in content and quality. The best ones, and sometimes the not so good ones, are tirelessly updated, provocative, and sometimes freshly reported. They're here to stay. It's hard to tell who is real and who isn't, but some tipsters apparently are more comfortable dealing with blogs than with established media and our quaint customs.
Go ahead and extend blanket protection of the First Amendment to all blogs if you want, but be prepared to write a check and go the distance at crunch time. I'll pick my friends and my battles, thanks.
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A regular salary may mean a whole hell of a lot to you when paying your bills, but it doesn't mean a thing to me when I evaluate your work. The strength of a real reporter is in the acquisition of facts (while those of us in other lines of work do what WE do) and relaying them to the reader without concealment or selective slant. Opinions we can all form on our own. I've been around a while and have concluded that the "best and brightest" don't go into journalism. Your column attempted to patronize the rest of us that don't have your "exalted" status; yet, frankly, you don't have what it takes to pull that off.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see, looking at TM's blog, that he has a huge issue/feud/vendetta going with Larry Godwin. That makes his motives in releasing this information IMO, highly suspect. Maybe you should be asking if Thad will be helping out "poor, railroaded" Dexter if his case gets tossed? It's fine to advocate on behalf of someone if it appears they are not getting the benefit of an impartial justice system. In this case, TM hasn't even given the justice system a chance to work. He's just firing randomly, hoping to sink Larry Godwin without regard to who gets hurt in the process. The victim's private life doesn't make him any less of a victim, nor does it make his killer, if convicted, any less of a murderer. TM was all over Herenton for a while, too, until Herenton campaign ads started showing up on his blog.
"Rules, principles, editing, attribution, corrections, and professionalism..." Which of these applied to the Flyer's unattributed posting of a photoshopped image of Rep. Stacey Campfield (which in turn was swiped from another newspaper) accompanied by a misspelling in the caption, and followed by no apology and no admitted error?
Um gee, Mick, maybe it's because none was needed. I rather liked the photo and thought it summed up Stacey's politics quite nicely. I don't need a special tag to tell me I'm looking at a photo illustration.
Mick Wright is a rabble-rouser just like Thaddeus, except without the ammo or readers. Instead of going after city officials, he hates the Flyer for some reason and even started a (truly pathetic) "parody" website that I won't even glorify by mentioning it's name. Get a life Mick. While trying to be the "alternative to the alternative," you've only succeeded in making yourself look like an ass.
The true action is in the "Comment Posting" sections on the net (blogs, Flyer, CA, etc). This is where the e-barroom fights begin. Someone gets loud, another throws a punch, before you know it some guy gets pushed onto the pool table and breaks it ...... Please, don't change a thing.
And by that time, the original instigator is cowering behind the bar. :)
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