Lone-wolf blogger refuses to howl for the feds
San Francisco blogger Josh Wolf emerged from captivity last Tuesday vowing to roam wherever his nose for news takes him.
Wolf spent 224 days in federal custody (that’s what his records show, but he says it may have been 226) for refusing to give grand jury testimony about a 2005 G-8 summit protest he covered as a freelance videographer.
The U.S. Justice Department was hot to know who attacked a San Francisco police officer and vandalized a squad car during the demonstration. Wolf, 24, maintained his raw video footage contained no applicable evidence and offered to let a judge review it.
But the feds insisted on attempting to turn the independent journalist into a tool of the state. Wolf stood his First Amendment ground for more than seven months. As part of the deal that secured his release, he posted the protest footage on his blog but maintained his refusal to testify.
Prosecutors reserve the right to subpoena Wolf again, but their role in this farce may be over. Either way, they’ll have to make room for the mainstream journalists now attacking Wolf.
Their dubious argument, as advanced Thursday by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders: Wolf’s advocacy for various causes strips him of the right to be called a journalist.
As a result, Saunders and other gatekeepers assert, he shouldn’t enjoy the protection of state (and potentially federal) laws that shield journalists from revealing confidential sources and work product.
Not only does this restrictive view of journalism set the stage for de facto state licensing of reporters; it also ignores U.S. history.
“The press in the revolutionary era was closer to advocacy journalism in many ways than today’s ‘objective’ journalism,” noted Gene Policinski, executive director of the First Amendment Center via phone Thursday. “The nation’s founders had to deal with a very partisan press.”
Today’s bloggers are direct descendants of yesterday’s pamphleteers. The only constitutionally acceptable definition of a journalist is someone with the intent to gather and disseminate information, regardless of slant.
After all, Saunders and I both write newspaper columns that mix reporting and opinion. What makes us functionally any different from Wolf?
Policinski provided a useful caveat: Advocates who participate in events they’re covering might not warrant press protections. But if they stand on the sidelines and intend to share an account with consumers, they’re standing under the broad umbrella of journalism.
Wolf proved his reporting bona fides by setting the U.S. imprisonment record for a journalist refusing to testify. He enhanced those credentials by launching a community media project from his cell at Dublin Federal Correctional Institution in Alameda County, Calif.
While writing blog entries he mailed to his father for posting, Wolf hit on the idea of creating a similar publishing opportunity for other prisoners.
With help from supporters, prisonblogs.net was born. Now that he’s free, Wolf plans to tweak the site and re-launch it in the next few weeks.
“Everyone in prison has a story – and half of them may be true,” Wolf told me Thursday. “There’s a lot of stuff that goes on in prison that never gets out.” To that end, he’s also planning a PBS-style documentary on the federal prison system.
“I’m of course going to continue to blog” at joshwolf.net, he added. “I will continue to engage in video journalism and will likely continue covering protests.”
How determined is this guy? Instead of quietly longing for his iPod behind bars, Wolf wrote a letter to Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs explaining why he should enable prisoners to download songs via iTunes. “One day I wanted to hear ‘I Walk the Line’ by Johnny Cash,” Wolf explained.
That should be his theme song.