Bloggers as Journalists

By Christopher Truscott

I posted this comment (below) to Minnesota Democrats Exposed in the wake of a Minnesota court ruling granting bloggers the same protections as journalists. Any thoughts?

Bloggers are journalists. Journalism isn’t a profession that requires a license, like a doctor or lawyer. All you need is the 1st Amendment, which is alive and well. (The 4th, 6th and 9th might be in trouble, however.)

In modern times we have the illusion of journalism as a more-or-less “fair and balanced” institution, but it hasn’t always been that way.

The newspapers of a century ago were so partisan they’d even make the most die-hard Air America or Fox News consumer blush. Skip back another century and you had politicians like Jefferson, Hamilton and Burr, et. al., sponsoring newspapers that smeared their opponents.

After decades of presenting both viewpoints (to some degree, at any rate) and letting the reader/viewer decide, blogs have emerged and taken us back to our roots. Hard as it may be to imagine, the founders would totally get what Web sites like MDE or Publius or Dump Bachmann are all about.

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