and they see only their own shadows

The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. These indeed have been historic weapons in the defense of liberty, as the pamphlets of Thomas Paine and others in our own history abundantly attest. The press in its connotation comprehends every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion.
        -- Justice Charles Evans Hayes, Lovell v. Griffin, 1934

In the height of the Great Depression, someone had an idea about whether  bloggers should be considered journalists. Not that Justice Hayes, born in 1882, would ever have conceived of the Web, let alone a Web log, as he considered whether the First Amendment applied to broadsheets put out in the city of Lovell, California.

I've been watching elite journalists muse soulfully on the question, "Are bloggers journalists?" for what feels like a sickeningly long time, but is probably only since this past February, when the National Press Club convened its first panel on the question in the aftermath of the Jeff Gannon scandal.

John Aravosis, had investigated a fellow named James Guckert, who had been allowed into the White House press corps under the name Jeff Gannon. Aravosis found out, among other things, that Gannon had advertised his services as a male prostitute online and that his news service, Talon News, was funded directly by the Republican Party (rather like those 18th-century news broadsheets Andie Tucher spoke of in that August lecture).

So with worried faces, a panel that included Gannon,  Congress Daily's John Stanton, former Philadelphia Inquirer staffer Ana-Marie Cox, now running an online column, mused soulfully on whether people like Gannon, or even like Cox, should be taken seriously, or seriously marginalized. (Aravosis, whose work exposing Gannon was the kind of digging Sree likes to talk about, wasn't invited onto the panel, though he spoke from the audience.)

The well-paid journalists in the room were worried, perhaps justly, about this blending of fact and opinion, which depending on who you read (just as with print magazines) can be crude or well crafted, thoughtful or not, original or lazy. These conversations seemed, at that point, kind of theoretical.

Not any more, in the wake of a journalism scandal far more explosive than Jeff Gannon and the resulting talk of a federal shield law, including testimony before Congress on the part of the very journalist who's at the center of the scandal. And the Press Club was at it again, on the same day as some of its  members were asking: do bloggers deserve this shield?  And the panel, this time including  Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics at the University of Minnesota, and two TV journalists, agreed "probably not." All of it part of "National Free Speech Week, which may define irony, as noted by Roxanne .

Suddenly we're wondering what sort of writer gets First Amendment protection, and of what kind. And that brings me - briefly, I promise - back to the Supreme Court.

In 1964 Justice Byron White,  cited the Lovett case in  Branzburg v. Hayes, which denied a blanket shield to a number of journalists:

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.

In other words, it would mean licensing journalists, like doctors or lawyers. And this is an excuse for the elite to come up with all sorts of reasons why Justices Hayes and White are wrong.

Now, "the latest photocomposition methods" are those of the online pamphleteer. And Senator Richard Lugar, sponsor of the new federal shield bill, apparently disagrees with both of the above. He told Editor and Publisher that bloggers are "probably not" included in his Free Flow of Information Act, though you'd likely not know from its language:

According to the first draft of the Free Flow of Information Act of 2005, the "covered person" protected by the bill's terms includes "any entity that disseminates information by print, broadcast, cable, satellite, mechanical, photographic, electronic, or other means and that publishes a newspaper, book, magazine, or other periodical in print or electronic form; operates a radio or television station (or network of such stations), cable system, or satellite carrier, or channel or programming service for any such station, network, system, or carrier; or operates a news agency or wire service." The legislation also covers employees, contractors or other persons who "gathers, edits, photographs, records, prepares, or disseminates news or information for any such entity."

"Disseminates information." Our media universe is crammed to the gills with information that needs fact-checking and analysis. As journalists we try to do both; what varies is how good the facts are, how we get them,  the extent to which our analysis is explicit, narrow and directive or multi-dimensional and more subdued in its presentation. The medium, I argue, is less relevant than the message.

Not that editorial oversight, or what some call "adult supervision," can't be damn near essential.  Some of the best blogs are group blogs for that reason; the more experienced minds can reality-check one another, as editors do in more established venues.

Venues like the New York Times -- wait, funny story, as Jon Stewart always says.

And we're back at Judith Miller, of course.

Who, by the Times' admission last Sunday and her own, was "Miss Run Amok" who could "do whatever I want." Bill Keller, who's supposed to be minding the store, said helplessly that Miller "kept drifting back" to military issues, after being warned off the beat. Kept drifting back? Who published her UN articles, sir, the ones that made life so unbearable for your UN correspondent,  Linda Greenhouse? She wasn't reduced to handing those stories out on the street or posting them on her LiveJournal. You paid her over $100K a year to "drift back."

And now it turns out that Miller had become Jeff Gannon on steroids. Your tabloid competitor, the New York Daily News, has been doing some of the reporting that you wouldn't let your own staff publish. And their source names Miller as part of the White House Iraq Group, the team tasked, in 2003, with selling the Iraq war to a justly queasy public.

Besides Rove and Libby, the group included senior White House aides Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, James Wilkinson, Nicholas Calio, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley. WHIG also was doing more than just public relations, said a second former intel officer.

"They were funneling information to [New York Times reporter] Judy Miller. Judy was a charter member," the source said.

This is the same Judith Miller who, as Bill Lynch told Romenesko, was licensed by the government to view "secret information."  Who then testified before Congress on behalf of the federal shield law. La commedia e finita, indeed.

Last week, Times Standards Editor Allan Siegel came before the Critical Issues class, and told how the newspaper was now tightening its standards for freelancers, to ensure that not a whisper of advocacy was in the resumé. (Buh-bye, any Times dreams I might have had....)  He also discussed Miller, with some embarrassment. But I wish the News article had come out before then, so we could have asked whether Miller's cozy relationship with power, her vaunted "access," weren't the worst kind of advocacy.

Or whether the paper still believes she deserved a shield.

Lindsay, currently covering Tom DeLay's perp walk in Austin, expressed the thoughts many of us have on the subject:

Shield laws exist to further the free flow of information in society at large, not to grant special powers to a group of people on the basis of their allegedly superior qualifications. Legitimate shield laws exist in order to create overall conditions under which the press can function optimally. Therefore, shield laws should use functional criteria to determine whether someone is a journalist--i.e., is this person reporting and disseminating information on matters of public concern? If we have shield laws that explicitly exclude bloggers and other non-traditional media workers, then we're faced with the worst of all possible worlds. In that case, the government would be making substantive decisions about who is a journalist based on the medium they publish in, their employment status, or the willingness of a media corporation to vouch for them.

If Lindsay sounds particularly passionate on the subject, it  may be because she (like me!) has become s more active reporter after a few years of writing a Web log known mostly for its sharp mix of political analysis, media criticism, and analytic philosophy.

When I was waiting to hear from Columbia, so was Lindsay - but she was waiting for admission to the far more select crew in the Ph.D. program in philosophy. When that department made the unwise decision to reject her, she began writing for some mainstream online publications, like Slate. And then, she was invited to go to new Orleans and report on what she saw there. Afterward, she says, her paid gig as a pharmaceutical writer just wasn't an option.

Katrina changed everything.

In the space of a few hours, I went from an anxious bystander to a journalist with support to cover the news. I quit my job. I quit with one day's notice. I just had to pack up and go.

----

I went to see my boss at the appointed time. It's a big building, so I set aside some time to puke in the 7th floor washroom if I needed to. Instead, I showed up early, feeling like a psychopath.

I sat down.  

My boss spoke before I could say anything. I couldn't believe what he was telling me. He said he'd been a stringer for Gulf War I. He said he understood that I needed to go. He said that if he was my age, he'd be doing the same thing. My gratitude was a headrush. I just couldn't get the words out.  

Luckily, he started talking about what it was like to be a stringer in a war zone. He told me about water purifiers, editors, oil rigs, and special metal cages you could get for your backpack.

I quote Lindsay at such length because her journey exemplifies what most writers not paid six figures know: that smart writing is smart writing. That while there's no subsitute for getting the facts yourself - reporting is addictive, something I'm learning anew in a sort of joyful torment  - there's also a place for thoughtful, more explicit analysis that helps provide a framework for all those facts.

And I think Walter Lippman, the iconic journalist whose Public Opinion is required reading for "Critical Issues,",would find something to like, and even admire, in her work -- even though, on the face of it, he was busy demanding that an "elite class" of political scientist provide a structure to contain the mess produced by unruly journalists.

The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act. Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.

Lippman's book starts with Plato, jumps to Aristotle, and stumbles past psychoanalysis and French military broadsheets before getting down to more classic journalistic topics like privacy, censorship and stereotype. Such melding is probably more common in the blogosphere than the front pages.

I like to think that even though he's been called a prototype of the neocons, he'd find absorbing the work of writers like Lindsay, like Armando at Daily Kos,  like the California writer who uses the name Jeanne d'Arc for her human rights blog Body and Soul.

And certainly he'd have something to say to the man whose masthead a drawing of Howard Beale and a quote from Network that's not unlike the following passage from Plato ,with which he begins his book.

"Behold! human beings living in a sort of underground den,
which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all across
the den; they have been here from their childhood, and have their
legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only
see before them; for the chains are arranged in such a manner as
to prevent them from turning round their heads. At a distance
above and behind them the light of a fire is blazing, and between
the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will
see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen
which marionette players have before them, over which they show
the puppets.

I see, he said.

And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying
vessels, which appear over the wall; also figures of men and
animals, made of wood and stone and various materials; and some
of the prisoners, as you would expect, are talking, and some of
them are silent?

This is a strange image, he said, and they are strange prisoners.

Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows,
or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the
opposite wall of the cave?

True, he said: how could they see anything but the shadows if
they were never allowed to move their heads?

And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they
would see only the shadows?

Yes, he said.

And if they were able to talk with one another, would they not
suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?"_
--The Republic of Plato, Book Seven. (Jowett Translation.)

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