"Cujo" in the court10/30/2009 12:55:00 PM  October is, of course, linked with the spooky and scary. That's proving true for ASNE members who find themselves running from dangers resembling the typical case of horror movie villains: killer animals, vampires, zombies, even the simple unsettling nothingness of the unknown. All threatening to rip newsgathering apart limb from limb, kill publication of important stories, and generally disembowel the First Amendment. Frightening stuff, I assure you.
Who can forget that rabid St. Bernard trapping a poor asthmatic boy in a car? It was vividly terrifying — enough so to keep me from wanting a dog until my early teens. But who thought that videos of dogs attacking each other could become one of the major First Amendment cases of the year? The good news is that I don't see United States v. Stevens posing any real threat to news organizations. In fact, after attending the oral arguments in that case, it seems like the justices gave a nice old belly rub to the news media.
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Dracula fears the light of open government10/30/2009 12:54:00 PM  The pop culture phenomenon of 2009 appears to be vampires. From "True Blood" to "Twilight" people cannot get enough of these bloodsucking heliophobes. You know who else hates sunlight? Congress. And they've proved it again in exempting from FOIA photos and videos of U.S. troops torturing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a FOIA request seeking all such photos and videos from the years 2002-2004. The Department of Defense refused to release the images, alleging that a privacy exemption within FOIA properly applies because release of the photos would generally cause harm to United States troops and citizens overseas.
The ACLU successfully appealed that denial. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ordered the government to release these records. But then we were hit with a one-two punch.
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What lies in "The Mist"10/30/2009 12:50:00 PM  You know what scares me the most in a horror movie? Not the gratuitous and clearly fake violence of a slasher movie. It's the dangers you can't see. What's behind that door? What's around that corner? The tension builds to such an extent that it generally outweighs what you find.
We're facing that situation as the Federal Trade Commission explores the fear of the moment: "From town crier to bloggers: How will journalism survive the Internet Age?" in a two-day workshop to be held on December 1 and 2 in Washington.
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FTC workshops on the future of the news industry
9/14/2009 5:46:00 PM The Federal Trade Commission has announced that it will be holding two days' worth of workshops on ...
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"The dog fighting videos case" directly affects news coverage
9/14/2009 5:19:00 PM ASNE also joined thirteen other media organizations and companies on a brief filed in the United St...
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Federal reporter's shield law
9/11/2009 3:25:00 PM The federal reporter's shield law, formally known as the Free Flow of Information Act, continues to...
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