Commentary

Just An Online Minute... Blogger Protection

  • by February 23, 2005

Now here’s something new, at least to the Minute.

There is a Committee to Protect Bloggers. Yes, there is.

It seems the one-month-old group, Committee to Protect Bloggers, was formed by a guy named Curt Hopkins, who decided that bloggers throughout the blogosphere, which he’s described as a “weird no man’s land,” need some form of protection. The group has developed an International Bloggers’ Bill of Rights, a petition designed to protect the free speech of bloggers who are often threatened in their workplaces.

Many bloggers are fired for revealing unsavory bits about their workplaces, bosses, and co-workers. The rise of blogs to prominence, (doesn’t just about every journalist pen a blog as his or her main occupation?), has meant navigating increasingly murky waters.

Are blogs private journals, public documents, or merely a publishing genre? Are the people who pen them journalists? What’s a journalist anyway? Do the speculations of a blogger writing about issues in the public domain require legitimate sources? What’s a legitimate source? How many sources are needed to confirm a choice morsel?

The Minute has these questions, you see. They are unrelenting… these questions.

Interestingly, Hopkins and the committee yesterday urged the blogosphere to support two imprisoned Iranian bloggers. Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad are being held in an Iranian prison. The committee asked bloggers to write letters to Iranian embassies among other actions. Sigarchi has been sentenced to 14 years in prison for voicing his concern over the arrest of other bloggers. Saminejad was arrested, freed on bail, then had his bail doubled – for what? Complaining on his blog about his previous arrests.

Outside of the United States, blogging isn’t just about media gossip, punditry, and pugnacious “gotcha” journalism. In Iran, as in China and other countries, it’s testing the very limits of free speech, proving just how precarious it is. It kind of makes the annual navel-gazing examination of the Conde Nast holiday luncheon seating chart look, well, more than a little sophomoric.

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