Friday, July 30, 2010

Blogger protests 1st amendment rights during altercation with police

[caption id="attachment_6526" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Judge's tools"][/caption]

DALLAS, PRN - Carol Forsloff --Recently there have been a number of
altercations between journalists and security officers.  One works for
the Wall Street Journal, the other is a blogger, so what's the
difference?


Earlier this week it was reported how a reporter, Doug Belkin of the Wall Street
Journal, trying to speak with one of former Governor Blagojevich's
attorneys in the hallways of the courthouse in Chicago, was arrested
after he said he only touched the shoulder of a security officer while
moving backward as instructed.


This week, another reporter is in the news, but this time it is an altercation
between a blogger and a security officer at the Miami-Dade Metrorail
Station.


The clash is
now central to a debate regarding whether citizens can use their cameras
in public places and also whether First Amendment rights apply to
bloggers.


Carlos Miller,
identified as a blogger, says he was exercising First Amendment rights
by videotaping at the Metrorail station, when a security guard grabbed
his video camera and took it from Miller. Miller then recorded the rest
of the confrontation using his iPhone.


There is also
some question about bloggers having First Amendment rights, since there
has been a case within the past year where a blogger was refused
immunity because there was a differentiation made between a blogger and a
journalist.


In April 2010
an appeals court in New Jersey has found shield laws protecting
journalists from revealing sources don't apply to bloggers, underlining a
key difference, but how this is applied in this case won't be known
unless it goes to court.


These issues continue to
be tested, so it will likely be of interest to members of the press how
this will be treated in the courts, if it gets that far.


An HDNet
World Report camera is reported to have captured the entire encounter
for an upcoming story on First Amendment Rights and taping police, with
the footage at the HDNet world report page.


"This is the type of work that earned this program an Emmy nomination," said Mark Cuban
chairman and co-founder of HDNet.  "The World Report crew is committed
to going after the tough stories, and this is just one more example of
their cutting edge work."


 

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