What a crock of bull! "Bloggers not Journalists"

[n2doc]

I guess you have to know the secret handshake first.....I guess Jeff Gannon did!

Josh Wolf -- blogger -- has no press pass
Debra J. Saunders
Tuesday, February 27, 2007


JOSH WOLF, the blogger who has spent some six months in prison for refusing to hand over a video he took of a violent July 8, 2005, protest in the Mission District of San Francisco to a federal grand jury, is not a journalist.
He is a blogger with an agenda and a camera, who sold a "selected portion" of the video of the demonstration, which left a San Francisco police officer with a fractured skull, to KRON-TV. The day after the melee, Wolf called himself on his videoblog an "artist, an activist, an anarchist and an archivist." He does not work for a news organization. He does not answer to editors who fact check. I do not understand why newspapers -- including The Chronicle -- refer to him as the "longest-imprisoned journalist" in America.
Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-S.F., who has spoken at Wolf fundraisers, told me, "I think he, and those who are doing similar kind of work, is in the process of redefining what a journalist is relative to 21st century technology." In this brave new world, no definition is sacred any more. But a camera and a Web site do not a journalist make, any more than shooting a criminal makes a vigilante a cop.
Wolf likes to put himself in the company of real journalists, such as The Chronicle's Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, who risked going to jail in order to protect their confidential source in the BALCO story. But unlike Fainaru-Wada and Williams, Wolf had no confidential source agreement. He was filming public protests; those protesters had no expectation of privacy.
Because he can't hide behind a confidential source agreement, Wolf has had to get creative. So, in a friend-of-the-court brief, the ACLU warned that if Wolf is viewed by anarchists and anti-war groups "as cooperating with the government, he will no longer be able to perform his vital role of covering these groups."
Wolf's actions, however, make a mockery of the ACLU argument. Wolf offered to show the outtakes of his video to a federal judge, just to prove that the video does not depict the police attacks in question. The judge refused.

more:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/02/27/EDGRJN79VM1.DTL

[AX10]

1. This jury needs to be hung out to dry.

This is absurd.

[sweetheart]

2. the witch hunts of olde...

...are ever repeated. The test for a journalist, is that they hand cuff you,
and tie a 50 pound weight to your ankles, dropping you in 100 feet of water.
If you sink, you're a journalist. If you float, you're a blogger.

she turned me in to a newt.

[zbdent]

3. Uh, Gucky didn't use his hands ...

on that secret "handshake" ...