The Citizens Press Rights Project

<![CDATA[Bob Cox of the Media Bloggers Association dropped into comments on my posting about making press rights mundane again and offered his take on the idea of extending press privileges. I’m going to repost his comments here and my reply, since it proposes what I think is a more aggressively democratic approach than a professional society:

Mitch,

I would love to open up our project to non-members but our lawyers are volunteers and I don’t think they would appreciate our abusing their generosity by turning their offer of help into a full-time job.

I have to edit that bullet list you quoted…our definition of “media blogger” is a lot softer than that (old) list. We softened the language elsewhere to cast a wider net but I guess we forgot to fix the section you quoted.

We are open to anyone who feels that they can make the case that they are a “media blogger” – this has led us to include “media relations” bloggers, “cartoonists”, “online radio shows”. We WANT members and have no idea of being exclusionary.

Either way, thanks for the mention – and don’t get sued! 🙂

Bob,
With all due respect and appreciating the humor you display, I’m not the one likely to get sued as I have been a journalist for 20 years, though one inclined to avoid professional societies. The problem is everyone who isn’t an experienced media blogger, whatever that means.
I also think that volunteers are great, but they aren’t going to be sufficient to drive a campaign to extend press protections to the self-publisher. However, every publisher in history owes their privileges to self-publishers like John Peter Zenger and Ben Franklin, so I don’t think you’re going far enough. I’d be happy to see you win a court case for a member, but there is a legitimate mechanism—insurance—that could be put in place to protect all bloggers.
The trick is deciding who to defend. If a blogger commits libel they should not be defended, so membership or payment towards the insurance should not guarantee a defense. The ACLU works that way, deciding which cases to take. With an insurer to foot the bill if someone is accused of libel or hauled into court over their sources, we could make a huge amount of progress.
I’ll tell you what, there is a simple way to do this: We set up a 501(c)3 that collects the money and buys the insurance policy, but that retains 5 percent or 10 percent to pay for a professional staff that is available to consult with bloggers wanting to know about the laws and that conducts teach-ins to spread information about how to write without crossing legal lines (we should tolerate the crossing all sorts of cultural, religious, artistic and aesthetic lines). If one million bloggers gave $10 a year—a tax paid by self-selecting citizens of the blogosphere—the program would be a huge success. If 100,000 gave $10, it will be a small success.
Call the project The Citizens’ Press Project and use banner ads donated by Google, Kanoodle, etc.
Mitch
The problem with taxes has always been who is spending them and how they get spent. But, look folks, if you want to create a polity of discourse in the Web that enjoys legal protection, we have to find a way to pay for it and pay big time, because this is a campaign that will consume money and people’s time, especially in the increasingly illiberal United States. Using insurance to leverage moneys paid is a way to amplify the funds available, but only if there is some picking of fights and not a sort of “we’ll protect everyone who makes a mistake” approach (which is not what I think the Media Bloggers are doing, but its services are available only to members). What I’m talking about is a system that controls the free-rider problem to the best of its supporters’ ability while taking on the broad spectrum of challenges to public press freedom we face.
This is a far more efficient way to undertake a sustained campaign for pushing press privileges to the edge of the network than by raising donations for individual battles, such as the Apple suit. Money could easily be deployed through the EFF, the ACLU or other organizations, but the challenge is how to raise enough to change the definition of “press” for the better and in the long term.]]>