Thursday, December 02, 2004

Free Press Rights for Bloggers

My colleague Eugene Volokh has a nice op-ed in today's New York Times on making sure that the First Amendment applies to bloggers, as well as the MSM (blogospherese for "MainStream Media"). Eugene writes:
Because of the Internet, anyone can be a journalist. Some so-called Weblogs - Internet-based opinion columns published by ordinary people - have hundreds of thousands of readers. I run a blog with more than 10,000 daily readers. We often publish news tips from friends or readers, some of which come with a condition of confidentiality.

The First Amendment can't give special rights to the established news media and not to upstart outlets like ours. Freedom of the press should apply to people equally, regardless of who they are, why they write or how popular they are.

Blog on, everyone.

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