Personal Liberty Digest: Victory For Citizen Journalism: Court Sides With Bloggers In 1st Amendment Challenge

by Ben Bullard 

An appeals court has tossed out a lower court’s finding that would have denied bloggers the same 1^st Amendment protections afforded to mainstream journalists.

That’s an enormous victory for citizen journalism, as well as for the essential right of every American to freely and plainly speak (and write) his mind.

In taking up an appeal of a case in which a blogger was sued for defamation, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals weighed whether bloggers generally could claim the same protections under the 1^st Amendment as conventional journalists, who can write enterprise pieces questioning the actions of public officials while protecting their sources.

Here’s The Hollywood Reporter’s synopsis of that case:

"

In a blog post, [Crystal] Cox accused Obsidian Finance Group and its co-founder Kevin Padrick of committing tax fraud while administering the assets of a company in a Chapter 11 reorganization. At trial, a jury awarded the plaintiffs a total of $2.5 million over false assertions.

Before the case got to trial, however, Cox pointed to landmark judicial opinions including New York Times Co. v. Sullivan to make the argument that because the blog post involved a matter of public concern, the plaintiffs had the burden of proving her negligence in order to recover for defamation. Alternatively, she asserted that Padrick and Obsidian were public figures and as such, they needed to show she acted with “actual malice.”

The trial judge responded that she had failed to submit “evidence suggestive of her status as a journalist.”     "

But the 9^th Circuit ruled that Cox didn’t need, under the Bill of Rights, to provide any kind of evidence to qualify her right to report on such a matter.

Continue Reading:  http://personalliberty.com/2014/01/17/victory-for-citizen-journalism-court-sides-with-bloggers-in-1st-amendment-challenge/