The Bush Administration Doesn't Think Blue Girl, Josh Marshall, and Kevin Drum Are Journalists

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing today examining the Free Flow of Information Act Of 2007. You can view the video webcast and copies of the witnesses prepared testimony here.

The bill is intended to create a Federal shield allowing journalists to protect their sources. The proposed legislation includes several exceptions applying equally to all journalists. To invoke any of the exceptions the government would be required to petition a Federal court.

While the Justice Department has never favored a shield law, the administration's most strongly held objections to this bill are aimed at its definition of "journalism." As proposed

The term "journalism" means the gathering, preparing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting, or publishing of news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public.

Obviously, the proposed definition is broad enough to include the work of bloggers. If the bill is enacted it will treat the reporting of Judith Miller and Blue Girl just alike. Josh Marshall and the New York Times will benefit equally. The posts or editorials Kevin Drum and William Safire will be entitled to exactly the same protections.

According to c\net the mere idea that bloggers might be entitled to protection as journalists has reduced the administration to a quivering state of apoplexy.

Rachel Brand, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, testified that "The definition is just so broad that it really includes anyone who wants to post something to the Web."

The administration's argument didn't fall on deaf ears. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) said, "I'd say anyone who didn't want to face legal action would immediately try to put up a blog and try to get journalistic protection."

The best defense of both the bill and bloggers came from William Safire. The long time New York Times columnist likes the definition's focus on the activity of journalism rather than the journalist's employer or paycheck. He testified that

Whether you're a blogger or whether you're The New York Times or CBS or The Wall Street Journal, if what you are doing is aimed at informing the public, then you're a journalist, whether you get paid for it or not.

The bill's sponsors have indicated that they want to pass the bill this session. We will follow it's progress, and especially whether the administration is able to deny bloggers engaged in journalism the bill's protection. Anybody know Brad Sherman. If so send him an email and tell him to join the 21st Century.

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Dedication: Committing acts of Journalism in the face of Tyranny

Iraq has become the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist. Since the invasion in 2003, 106 journalists, mostly Iraqi's, and 35 support staff have been killed. Most have been deliberately targeted; 12 were murdered in May alone.

One of the murdered journalists was Sahar al-Haideri, a 45- year-old mother of three. She had received 13 death threats before her murder in Mosul last week.

She knew her calling would cost her her life, but she refused to back down. "We know we will be killed soon," she told fellow journalists on the Journal Iraq online newspaper. She had even stopped using a nom de plume and wrote under own name with her picture. She said: "I was kidnapped and threatened while using a pen name, so I decided to write ... with my real name."

The Ansar al-Sunna fundamentalist group claimed responsibility for killing Mrs al-Haideri, saying she "distorted the reputation of the mujahedin [fighters]." They had put her name on a death list, that included nine journalists, issued by the Islamic State of Iraq, the umbrella organisation of extreme Jihadi and Salafi groups. The list was posted in several mosques in Mosul.

"When she arrived at the area of the ambush the brothers rained her with bullets from their machineguns killing her instantly," Ansar al-Sunna said. It added that it had found the telephone numbers of policemen on her mobile phone, citing this as evidence that "she was an agent for the apostate police and the government of the apostate [Prime Minister, Nouri] al-Maliki."

When colleagues called Mrs al-Haideri's phone after she was murdered it was answered by an insurgent who said "she went to hell".

Mrs al-Haideri knew her home was being watched because two of the 13 death threats she received were contained in handwritten letters left at her house, she told the Iraqi Journalistic Freedom Observatory. The group said Mosul, a largely Sunni city with a Kurdish minority, had become the most dangerous city in Iraq for journalists, with 35 killed since 2003.

Sahar al-Haideri worked in an environment where the media is struggling to fill the void of information on the developments in war-torn Iraq. She freelanced for various news services, including Voices of Iraq, the online newspaper Journal Iraq, the National Iraqi News Agency and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.

Targeting the press is especially heinous, and to my mind, the mark of a coward. A coward that can only resort to the sword when faced with the power of the pen.

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Targeting Journalists, Silencing Truth

Alaa Uldeen Aziz, Left & Saif Laith Yousuf, right
This undated handout photo provided by ABC
shows the two Iraqi journalists working for ABC,
who were ambushed and killed
as they drove home from work in Baghdad Thursday.

Two more journalists were senselessly slaughtered in Baghdad on Thursday. They were run down by two carloads of gunmen, forced from their vehicle and gunned down in the street. The murders of cameraman Alaa Uldeen Aziz, 33, and soundman Saif Laith Yousuf, 26 brought to 104 the number of journalists killed while covering the four year old Iraq war. Of that number, 82 have been Iraqis and 61 have been killed covering the violence in Baghdad. In addition to the 104 journalists who have perished, 32 media assistants – locals who serve as drivers, guards, guides and interpreters – have died in the service of reporting the war as well.

"Many places in Baghdad are just too dangerous for foreigners to go now, so we have Iraqi camera crews who very bravely go out, and without them we are blind," ABC Baghdad correspondent Terry McCarthy said.

The loss of any journalist is tragic. The loss of these men to deliberate, cold-blooded murder should hit us all in the gut.

Godspeed, Gentlemen. With reverence.

[Cross-posted from Blue Girl, Red State]

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