Letters to the Editor
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re: If he had a degree in journalism and did this for his paper/magazine/website/news show, we would not question this behavior.
Personally, if he had a few bylines and a history of reportage or journalism, that would clinch it for me - the guy was an abvious dilitante - reminds me - but to a much lesser extent of Brad Will - another self-proclaimed journalist, but one with some stories on his side.
Wolf is a fake...
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He does have a few bylines -
A little research provides the following from Wolf's site:
After graduating high school, I briefly wrote for UC Santa Barbara’s Daily Nexus before taking an Internship at the Santa Barbara Independent where I worked for about six months writing blurbs for the news department.
After moving to San Francisco, I’ve been actively contributing articles and video reports for my blog as well as Indymedia. I have also written for the Haight Ashbury Beat.
I’m currently employed as the Outreach Director for peralta.TV, a department of the Peralta Community College District, and I am also an SAT teacher for the Kaplan Test preparation company.
Everyone has to start somewhere. Wolf has an interest and is pursuing this as a profession; because he's early in his career, people are questioning how he approaches it. Seems to me he is simply doing what he loves, and taking advantage of available technology to do it on his own terms.
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Martyr for What Cause?
A lot of people seem to believe that the central issue in the Josh Wolf case is whether a blogger can be a journalist. (Of course this question is of great interest to the people who produce and read a pioneering online newsmagazine which features a number of blogs.) Let us stipulate that indeed bloggers can be journalists and let us take Wolf at his word that he is a journalist. Even so, I am having a hard time understanding exactly what is the First Amendment principle that Josh Wolf has “martyred” himself for.
To paraphrase the 9th Circuit’s recounting of the facts in the Wolf case, the activities which Wolf videotaped occurred entirely in public. Wolf simply videotaped what people did in a public place. Wolf never claimed that he filmed anything confidential nor that he promised anyone confidentiality or anonymity. Wolf did not ask anyone any questions while he was videotaping. He was simply a witness with a videocamera at an event playing out on the city streets.
If these same events had been picked up by a building security camera, prosecutors would certainly have the right to subpoena the videotape, even if the camera was privately owned. If a passing non-journalist tourist had recorded these events with a camcorder, virtually everyone would agree that prosecutors would be well within their rights to subpoena the videotape and compel the tourist to testify to the grand jury about what he or she had seen.
Let us assume that Wolf’s footage of the protest which allegedly resulted in the assault of a police officer was directly relevant to the grand jury’s investigation of the crime. Let us further assume (as the 9th Circuit found) that the grand jury’s investigation is being undertaken in good faith. If we can compel ordinary citizens to testify about crimes they may have witnessed and to turn over video evidence they have which may be relevant to the investigation of the crime, why should we allow Josh Wolf to withhold his videotape of events playing out in the open and refuse to testify about an incident he saw simply because he is (or claims to be) a journalist?
Instead of Josh Wolf videotaping an anarchists’ protest, suppose a Fox News crew were to videotape the police brutally attacking a group of peaceful protestors. Shouldn’t the authorities be able to compel Fox to turn over the tape? (I acknowledge that California’s Shield Law might indeed allow the Fox News crew to withhold the tape; if so, the California Shield Law goes too far.)
How is the right to a free press under the First Amendment compromised by requiring Wolf to produce his videotape? What principle is Wolf defending? Does it really impair the journalist’s ability to ply her trade if we require her to turn over raw footage of events occurring out in the open?
Journalists frequently remind us that their mission is to expose the truth. Isn’t that what the grand jury was asking Josh Wolf to do? Wolf freely concedes that he sympathizes with the protestors. Is it possible that Wolf’s initial refusal to provide his unedited videotape to authorities was motivated, at least in part, by a desire to impede (or at least not to assist) an investigation into the conduct of people with whom he sympathizes? Where does the defense of the First Amendment end and obstruction of justice begin?
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publishes under the name insurgent
Good point Alex. However, there are no actual articles out there that anyone can read other than the ones posted on his blog. This doesn't mean to say they are not out there, but the material he chooses to post on his website, under the moniker 'insurgent', doesn't include any that he wrote for these traditional publications. They do include such titles as 'No to government, no to empire' and 'Wake the f**k up'.
Although this material doesn't appeal to me, he has every right to blog about it, but I'll repeat my former comment, is it any surprise that the government didn't trust him when he said the tape had no valuable information on it and not afford him the same protection as a journalist?
For someone so early in their 'journalist' career he certainly provides enough material to question his integrity.
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Parmella -
No, it's not surprising in the least the government acted as they did. I think he should have made a copy of the tape for himself and handed the original over. But on the other hand, if he felt the police were going to mine the tape for potential suspects, and felt the tape's content to be incomplete or misleading, he might be justified in refusing the tape on the principle of harm limitation. A journalist should not share data that could adversely affect another individual unfairly.
An example would be if a tape began by showing person A hitting person B, but didn't show person B hurting person A immediately beforehand. Or if it showed someone going through a broken store window, but not the fact that they came upon the window already broken, and went through it to follow/rescue a child who went through the broken window beforehand.
For this reason I think he was right to refuse to testify about his tape, if possibly wrong about not turning the tape over. I haven't seen the tape and wasn't at the event, so I can't make that call.
As I said in my initial post, I don't actually claim to know if he is or is not a journalist. I don't call myself an author, despite having bylines under my own name in a regularly published paper (back in the '80s) and a great deal of writing, because it's not how I pay the bills. So I probably wouldn't call him a journalist by that definition.
One interesting thing I discovered on journalism.org (the Project for Excellence in Journalism) is that there is no hard-and-fast rule about where lines should be drawn. As a principle, the PEJ writes that journalists "must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience." Being unable to read his mind, none of us can definitively say whether Wolf is doing that or not, but we should defend his right to do so.
If he believes himself to be a journalist and is genuinely doing his best ethically, he's probably doing more than most professionals in the field. I might not agree with his approach, but short of madness or deception or causing harm to others, I think he should have the right to pursue the work.