The Coming War on Blogs

This comes as no surprise to me. The MSM will try and exert what ever influence they can to muzzle the blogosphere. That is I have said that the MSM can not be depended upon to protect the bloggers free speech rights. It becomes more imperative each day that we in the blogosphere continue to apply pressure to our elected representatives to provide legislation that will protect our free speech rights.

James D. Miller at Tech Central Station outlines the areas he sees where the MSM may try and take action to muzzle the bloggers.

"1. Campaign Finance Reform -- Blog entries in support of a candidate could be considered political contributions to that candidate. The danger for most bloggers would lie not in contributing more than the legally permissible amount to a candidate, but rather in having to fill out the paperwork necessary to report their "political contributions".



The MSM, of course, would never permit their editorials in favor of a candidate to be considered political contributions. So to use campaign finance reform against bloggers, courts would have to distinguish between bloggers and the "legitimate" media. Any definition of bloggers will be imprecise, but this won't stop courts because most legal categories already have fuzzy boundaries. To define a blogger, courts could simply use the "I know it when I see it" approach famously employed by Justice Potter Stewart to determine whether something constituted hard-core pornography.



2. Libel Law -- The MSM used to fight aggressively against any expansion of libel law, but I predict this soon will change. The MSM can handle the burden of defending itself from libel suits much more easily than bloggers can. By increasing the scope of libel law the MSM would impose costs on all journalists which they, but not bloggers, could absorb.



3. Copyright Law -- Blogs often use information from other sources and, from what I have observed, sometimes flagrantly violate copyright laws. Imagine if Congress increased the complexity and penalties of copyright laws. Non-lawyer bloggers could never be sure what constituted legal fair use of MSM stories and information. Enhanced copyright laws could have a chilling effect on blogging."

We already know of the move afoot to use McCain-Feingold to regulate political blogs. Since the majority of the MSM were supportive of this, they will likley continue to push for the FEC to make a ruling stiffling the blogosphere.

Using libel law expansion will put a severe financil burden upon bloggers, since most do not have to financial resources to fight back.

Copyright law is another approach, but I think by simply linking to those articles, there would not be a violation of copyright.

You can also expect that the dems will be onboard with the MSM here. Consider what John Kerry had to say:

"The Democratic Party will likely assist the MSM in their attack on blogs, not because most blogs are pro-Republican but because blogs are not as consistently liberal as the MSM. John Kerry, for example, is calling for the government to do something to protect the MSM. As he said in a recent speech:

"The mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning. But there's a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information. And that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country. And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that. The question is, what are we going to do about it?""

One would hope that the Republicans will see this for what it is, another attempt to keep the MSM as the DNC's propaganda machine. I cannot stress enough the importance of fighting now before the MSM gets untracked and attacks. Free speech is our right! - Sailor