Judge Says Blogs Are Guilty Of, Well, Just Guilty Dammit!
from the take-a-letter dept
It's not totally clear what's going on with this story, but it's worth passing along anyway. An article on a tech news site reports how Edward Fadeley, a retired Oregon judge, "has launched a blistering attack on the blogosphere", saying it's full of lies and defamation, with no easy legal recourse to keep things in check. This isn't really true -- libel and other laws regarding defamation apply online, just as they do off. An apparently misguided person spouting off about the dangers of the internet isn't really anything new, but the sheer lack of context for the outburst is puzzling. The rant looks to have first appeared as an op-ed in The Oregonian newspaper in June, but apparently Fadeley felt strong enough about it to issue his own press release repeating it this week. Whatever the motivation, it would be nice to see a former state Supreme Court justice put a little more effort into creative a coherent argument. He says, "Ten years ago Congress passed a law requiring blog operators to protect the public by self-regulation," and it's not clear at all what he's talking about, maybe part of the Communications Decency Act that protects site owners from comments others leave on their sites, which has been affirmed by courts several times -- but we're relatively certain that members of Congress (known for being such a tech-savvy bunch) ten years ago had never heard the word "blog". He also says that bloggers don't deserve the same protections as journalists because they're not held to the same standards, apparently unaware that "real journalists" can make stuff up too, or even make defamatory claims. He closes by saying law needs to catch up to technology, but that simply isn't the case when current laws apply to new media just like they do old media.
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Reader Comments
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Wow
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Re: Wow
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Does it seem to anyone else that...
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Somebody's ox
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the judge
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RE: #6 the judge
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Re: RE: #6 the judge
There must be a mind for there to be dementia. I don't see any evidence of that here.
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We need him...
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Re: We need him...
Freaking Oregonian tree-huggers can't even pump their own gas.
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Yes Bloggers Lie, but so does the mainstream news
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Yes Bloggers Lie, but so does the mainstream news
If the real news lies, how can anyone expect a bunch of admittedly biased hacks to report any better.
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Re:
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Re: Re:
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Re: Re:
"The individual journalist or blogger is responsible"
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Ed Fadeley
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Re: Ed Fadeley
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Re: Ed Fadeley
Really folks, you can't take politicians from Oregon seriously.
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Re: Re: Ed Fadeley
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I highly doubt that you can find an organization that doesn't slant topic. I really find it bizare that we contiune to believe that humans in can be impartial. I believe everyone will slant a story to make it reflect their own opinions and prejudices. Personally I find the big media annoying because your average journalists either deludes themselves into believing they are being impartial, or they don't try at all and just lie and say they are.
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Blog integrity
As a former journalist who was bound by a stringent threshold and limited on what I could print, I'm disheartened to see unsourced stories and half-truths spread widely on blogs.
Unfortunately, these are presumed to be accurate. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren't. Most often they muck up a complex issue. But always, they are unmonitored. I don't care what you say about libel law applying to Internet publishing -- it's FAR harder to establish damages, because you can't quantify the audience who read what was printed online.
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