Bloggers Officially Get First Amendment Protections

Journalists no longer have special protections that bloggers do not. This is good news, and it probably pisses off a lot of jerks that spent years at j-school.

From THR here:

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has issued an important ruling in a case that centers upon the rights of bloggers sued for defamatory blog posts. With salacious gossip about celebrities and other public officials increasingly being traded on the Internet, the appellate court focused on whether bloggers can hold the First Amendment up as a defense to the same extent as trained journalists.

In the ruling (read here), 9th Circuit Judge Andrew Hurwitz writes that while there is a paucity of rulings in his appellate circuit examining the First Amendment and defamation in the age of blogging, there are a host of big rulings, including Citizens United v. FEC as well as rulings from other circuits, that reject the notion that the institutional press has First Amendment advantages that individual speakers don’t.

“The protections of the First Amendment do not turn on whether the defendant was a trained journalist, formally affiliated with traditional news entities, engaged in conflict-of-interest disclosure, went beyond just assembling others’ writings or tried to get both sides of a story. … In defamation cases, the public-figure status of a plaintiff and the public importance of the statement at issue — not the identity of the speaker — provide the First Amendment touchstones.”

Anyone can claim the protections of the first amendment when it comes to writing. People that get butthurt over things that someone writes about them can no longer attempt to squelch free speech by threatening a defamation suit without first proving intent and malice.