Honestly, that seems more like an argument to abolish prosecutors… or allow private prosecutions again.
Isn’t this just another form of “if you didn’t do anything wrong, you don’t have anything to fear from widespread surveillance”? And we do live in a country where the passage of unjust laws keep certain groups of people from receiving justice.
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OK, this seems downright silly to me.
Let’s think about what an analog to this would have been, in the pre-internet era.
I’m going to print out a one page screed on 8 1/2 x 11 paper and go around town stapling it to every telephone pole I can find. Would that make me someone engaging in “press activity?” It is speech, but is all speech “press activity?” I would argue absolutely not. Thus, in the internet era, not all electronic posting of information is press activity.
I don’t think it’s a good argument. We are obviously free to disagree.
I already said - it’s a desire to jail Assange, which started well before the 2016 election.
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But it’s not the pre-internet era. What would be considered journalism has always been a moving target and has always been evolving with new technologies.
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While this is true, the abandonment of many of the very good things about journalistic practice that have arisen over many years “because internets” is not a good reason nor a good set of actions, I would submit.
Case in point: Donald Trump is the FREAKING PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
Something very significant in the fourth estate has utterly failed.
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There’s no “if.” Wikipedia releases editorialized content all the time. They became a household name thanks to Collatoral Murder - an edited video from the raw leak they also made available to everyone. Wikileaks releases editorial content on Twitter daily, both by saying “look at this article we wrote” and by saying “look at this article someone else wrote” and by providing their own opinion on the material.
They have always both managed a database of leaked material released publicly and editorialize on the content themselves.
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OMG, it looks like you’ve never heard of pamphleteering as the basis of most press laws.
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One of these things could be argued to be “press activity,” and one, IMO, simply is not. Not by any sort of traditional (and worthwhile) standards and practices.
Do you feel that the government has a legal right to stop you from criticizing them on Facebook? In the case of your telephone pole example we have court rulings that the things you would stick to the phone pole are in fact protected, but the ability to stick them to utility poles isn’t. So the government doesn’t have to build a Facebook alternative for you, but can’t stop the posting on a private pole/ website. The press protections surrounding signs are really interesting and I would point you to the work of prof. Alan Weinstein at the Cleveland Marshal College of Law. Once you’re talking about signs the law gets weirdly nuanced. https://works.bepress.com/alan_weinstein/
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And both of those are grouped together into a single entity - as in Wikileaks is journalism and something else.
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I agree, which is a very good reason why we (as a society, not just us) should think about the role of new technologies, especially bearing in mind how many legitimate journalist actually do use social media in their job.
I think it’s less that and more that some powerful elements have bought up some of the 4th estate in order to undermine it, which is why it’s probably a great idea to patronize and support alternative sources… and this is not a new problem, but has been a problem since the age of yellow journalism. Just because Fox, CNN, MSNBC, etc are corporate shills doesn’t mean that there aren’t people out there doing solid work based on high journalistic standards, but that’s always been an uphill struggle. In this case, the corporate media has always took a corporate line against support of dissidents like Manning, and it’s usually only been people operating outside the bounds of that who have been willing to speak truth to power (think of how for quite a while, the media didn’t have a real problem with McCarthyism, until Murrow started speaking out, or how the media just parroted the white house on Vietnam until Cronkite went during Tet and reported on that.
Again, back to the 60s, where underground newspapers challenged mainstream narratives on the regular.
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This is why I specifically differentiated between “speech” and “press activity.” Do you think those two things are identical to one another? I do not.
So you agree that the dumping of information they receive is not press activity? Because that’s the point I was trying to make. Entities are capable of multiple classifications, and being one at times does not, to me, mean that they are always or exclusively this thing. Thus, we can differentiate subsets of their activities, and it is right to do so. Both in the case of individuals, and organizations. Nothing is a monolith IMHO, and certainly not large organizations made up of many people.
I would disagree with your assessment of where the line is, but not by much. If they knowingly (or nudge-and-a-wink deniably) published confidential material acquired illegally by a state actor, that was detrimental to another state, then they shifted across that line from press to agent of one state against another. I don’t think that’s so much a legal line, but I do think that it should change their relationship with media outlets. If that scenario turns out to be true, they can’t be trusted as a source anymore and the various outlets they’ve worked through in the past - The Guardian, NYT, WaPo, etc. should shun them or at least treat anything WL publishes like it’s a press release from an intelligence organization.
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And even before that, to the start. The origin of press freedom as an actual concept was because of people wandering the streets with one-sheets of political opinion. (Defoe, Paine, anonymous hordes!)
The most relevant thing here is probably the case that decided when reporters had to answer to Grand Juries…
“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.”
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Handbills, signs, and website postings are all press depending on how they are used. The case law tends to focus on the speech component of those things because there is no single coherent definition of press the way there is in legal circles for speech. It is impossible to separate me posting a handbill to the phone pole about the unreported crimes of officials from me posting about my awesome new car without getting in to debates about content which is against the one bright line rule in first amendment law. So again, yes I consider all of those things possibly press depending on their use. If I staple a New York Times article to a pole it doesn’t stop being press.
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That’s an odd way to try to turn what I was saying back on me when I was saying they can be more than one thing and you were saying they didn’t have any press activities.
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Very true, and well put. As a technologist who works with media and studied journalism (but I would not call myself a journalist, even though I write and publish articles in print magazines and on the web! ha!) I do not think nearly enough of this discourse has been had.
The ultimate example is Twitter. Twitter is being used in a very strange way by everyone, and now this includes our President, as well as the media. I do not think the way it is being used by either is usually appropriate.
Fact is, the internet and tech just happened too fast for the biological and social species homo sapiens to properly adapt, and this is fucking a LOT of shit up right now. It’s been going on for a couple hundred years but just really continues to leap at an exponential rate of change. Those of us who were geeky kids in the early 90s and who both used modems before most people had any idea what a modem or network was, and happened to read a ton of cyberpunk sci-fi, kind of saw this coming. We weren’t going to develop the antibodies fast enough. So NONE of what’s going on surprises me in any way shape or form. But I don’t have to like it, even if on one hand, it does keep me very fascinated and intrigued.
Which btw does include some of the people at companies you reference above. And certainly aspects of the non-mainstream media. Which, too, have crossed over a bit – David Korn of The Nation is on MSNBC all the freaking time. I like The Nation. This does not mean the overall slant of The Nation is reflected by MSNBC.
I don’t really consider Manning to be a dissident, if by using that word you include positive associations (you may not be). I think Manning’s act was traitorous, in direct violation of an oath that she took to her country. There are ways it could have been done, that weren’t, that I would have more respect for. I think she was manipulated, I think the military treated her poorly while in service, and I think the government treated her even worse, really criminally so, during her incarceration. That’s horrible, and I feel awful she went through those experiences. To me, this does not excuse the very, very big mistake she made, which was deserving of severe penalty.
And even if I thought her action had been heroic, I would still submit that someone who is going to do something like that, needs to do it with the full expectation and even willingness that they will lose their freedoms for it. The victimization she experienced does not, IMO, absolve her of the crimes committed. It does not turn an anti-hero into a hero. They are mutually independent.
So, and maybe you’re not an example of this, but I have to say some here appear to be, it sure seems like how you feel about this current situation and the jailing has a lot to do with how you view Manning and her past actions.
Well, let’s chalk it up to a misunderstanding. I was, perhaps could have been clearer, really referring to the predominant thing Wikileaks is associated with, which is the massive dumpings of information they receive without a ton of review and editing of those materials prior to doing so. And now suuuure seems to be in the pocket of Putin. Might as well call them an agent of a state actor – not exactly “press” as in “free press.”
