Bloggers and Legal Rights

Richard Campbell - Author, Media and Culture

The difference between what's going on in the blogging world where we have millions and millions of new bloggers with their opinions and sort of old style traditional journalism; it's complicated. And I think one of the things that the blogging world has brought to journalism that's very interesting is their acting as sort of another check and balance on journalists themselves. So you have bloggers out there looking at traditional journalism and actually fact checking. I think this is a great thing that's come to journalism, that you have you this whole world opened up to journalism that's both scary to traditional journalists because there's now a watchdog watching them. They're used to being the watchdogs.

Frank LoMonte - Student Press Law Center Attorney

The First Amendment, even though it speaks in freedom of the press, hasn't really been interpreted except in very limited circumstances to give any more rights to a person who is on the staff of a newspaper and owns a printing press than someone who, let's say, has a Web site and is a blogger. The first amendment protects speech by the individual speaker as well as the institutional speaker.

Joe Urschel - Newseum in Washington, DC

Bloggers are protected by the same laws. They're also subject to the same laws. The same libel laws would apply to a blogger. However, there's a greater deal of anonymity on the Web. It's a little harder to find—it's very easy to find a reporter at The Washington Post, he's got his name right on a story, you know the address of the newspaper, you can walk right over and lay a subpoena on somebody--but how do you find an anonymous blogger out there in the blogosphere?

Frank LoMonte

There's one body of law and it is the same body of law whether your medium is a piece of paper or a computer screen. And so the same rules apply in terms of you can't put somebody under covert surveillance and take their photo and use it in a way that invades their privacy. You certainly can't defame somebody by publishing false information that's injurious to their reputation or their career. All those things hold equally true online as they do on paper and people can and do get successfully sued if they exceed those boundaries.

Richard Campbell

So that said, I think this is a really exciting thing. That it's very, very hard for journalists anymore to get away with plagiarizing. To get away with making stuff up. It's so easy to get caught now because you have lots of people, lots of citizen journalists out there checking the traditional media and watching over it.

Joe Urschel

If you believe that a proliferation of ideas and a multiplicity of voices is a good thing, which I do, then I think the idea of blogging and partisan publications whether they be printed or digital, they just add to that, as the old cliché goes, the old marketplace of ideas. It may require you to be a more creative consumer then you ever had to be before. Because you have to be able to be more sophisticated in the way that you look at the voracity of information. How can you distinguish between something that's accurate and true, between something that's fabricated and manipulative? People who consume news products now, I think, need that higher degree of analytical thinking and skepticism. Because, there really aren't that many sources around that are operating on the traditional model of fairness and accuracy in the new, this new world of digital delivery.