Who, What, and How: Identifying Judicial Constructions of Journalism

ABSTRACT

The networked era has made it increasingly difficult to define journalism and to separate it from other types of information. This is no small thing. The definition of journalism influences its practice and its role in democratic society. This article identifies themes from judicial definitions of journalism from recent U.S. state and federal cases. Jurists’ rationales for why a person is or is not a journalist have come as they face a variety of cases in which bloggers, message-board posters, website publishers, and others have claimed protections that have historically been primarily associated with traditional journalists. Ultimately, judges have constructed a discourse about journalism that combined concerns regarding how closely the process and practices the publishers used to gather and communicate the information aligned with traditional journalistic work, the public-service value of the information, and the journalistic credentials of the publisher. Though concern for how the work was created and who communicated it was crucial, jurists consistently conveyed the public-service role was most instrumental in their evaluations, often rationalizing broad expansions of what legally constitutes journalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalism
• press
• First Amendment
• democracy
• networked era
• Supreme Court

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).