Are journalists more protected than bloggers?
Jul 17th, 2007 by Milko Georgiev
Apart the extremely alarming case of police harassment of bloggers, our media community is confronted with a curious case of interpretation of the liberty of expression and speech. During the interrogatory of the blogger summoned by the police was also warned that bloggers are more likely to be brought to justice than an ordinary offline media journalist, because journalists enjoy a higher grade of protection by the law.
I have however never seen a legal interpretation of the role of bloggers in any legislation in Europe
Nelly Ognianova, an ex-member of the Council for Electronic Media (CEM) - the authority in charge of the regulation of radio and TV broadcasting in the country, as well as one of the leading specialists in media legislation in Bulgaria has discussed the case in her blog (sorry, only in Bulgarian), explaining that both in Europe and US such cases of discriminative treatment in terms of protection of the right of free speech were rejected by courts. As an example she quotes the Apple v. Does case.
The key factor that differentiate a blogger from a journalist is that bloggers presumably offer their ‘information service’ for free, which, as Ognyanova says, makes them immensely more free than any other journalists.
Is civil journalism a real threat to classic media?
