In other words, 398 members of the House of Representatives want a federal shield law that is means tested.
The problem is that the 1st Amendment does not protect remunerative speech, nor accurate speech, nor sensible speech, nor responsible speech nor even decent speech. It simply protects speech and leaves all other distinctions to a free people, who may or may not choose to listen, anyway.
It's hard to imagine any American court accepting the notion that our Constitution protects only the speech of those who make money from it. And if this shield is not being erected to further the intentions of the 1st Amendment, then what, precisely, is its purpose?
Well, one consequence -- perhaps unintended by those who wrote the bill but not unwelcome among many who work for traditional news organizations -- is that enactment of the House bill would exclude from protection nearly all the bloggers and so-called "citizen journalists" who have proliferated across the Internet in recent years. There's no need to engage the quality or utility of their work here. Suffice to say that any legal protection that shields newspaper reporters and television broadcasters but excludes this new digital press is swimming against the tide of history in a silly -- perhaps, even wicked -- fashion. In fact, you can make a fairly compelling argument that the speech exercised by the bloggers and citizen journalists is probably much closer to that the Framers intended to protect than what you found on the front page of this newspaper today. Not even the far-sighted Madison could have envisioned anything like an investigative reporter.
Yes, that means that a federal shield law needs to treat the Los Angeles Times' White House correspondent the same way it treats some guy tapping fitfully on his laptop in a shed in the Ozarks and trying to persuade his three readers that nothing will be right in this country until we go back on the gold standard and everybody weighs the same.
That's the thing about freedom: It's inconvenient and protecting it usually is a messy business.
--
timothy.rutten@latimes.com
