The Hollywood Liberal

Blogger behind bars 171 days and counting

LA Times
WASHINGTON — Freelance videographer Josh Wolf defied a federal grand jury’s order in July to hand over raw footage of anarchists clashing with police in San Francisco.

He said he was protected by the 1st Amendment. A federal judge said he was in contempt of court.

On Aug. 1, the 24-year-old blogger reported to the federal detention facility in Dublin, Calif. He has been there ever since — except for a period in September when he was freed while a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on the legality of his incarceration. (The panel upheld it.) As of Tuesday, he had been incarcerated longer than any journalist in modern U.S. history.

Wolf’s mother, a third-grade teacher from Wrightwood, will be on Capitol Hill today to lobby members of Congress to help free her son. Liz Wolf-Spada also plans to push for a federal shield law that would protect mainstream journalists as well as independent journalists and bloggers like her son.
“I’m asking that they treat an independent journalist the same way they treat the journalists who work for the Hearst Corp.,” she said, referring to the company that owns the San Francisco Chronicle and other papers.

H.L.s Take
Being a blogger myself I have to agree with Ms. Wolf-Spada, Bloggers and independent journalists should be given the same rights as big time newspaper reporters. Bloggers have influenced mainstram media to the point that only 2 years ago they were still fawning all over Bush, however the constant stream of infromation coming out of the blogs about Bush’s administration, & The Iraq War, forced the MSM to take a look at stories that could no longer be ignored. Thanks partially to that The Republican were voted out last November and Bush’s approval ratings are at an all time low. It would have been nice if the MSM would have taken the same stance on Bush before the 2004 election as they are taking now, they might have spared us 4 More years of total failure on every front.
So why shouldn’t bloggers be afforded the same rights as jouralists that work for Fox News or The New York Times, nowadays the bloggers are much more credible, as witnessed by our next story….

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 3:52 pm and is filed under H.L. News, Main Blog (All Posts). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.