The Coming War on Blogs

Tech Central Station reports It's a universal law of capitalism: when an industry faces a new and significant threat to its profits and powers it turns to the government for protection. Well, bloggers who write on current events are challenging the mainstream media (MSM), the most politically well-connected industry in America. Watch for the MSM to start using their political influence to burden bloggers.

But won't the First Amendment protect blogs? Unfortunately, courts already hold that many governmental restrictions on speech don't violate the First Amendment, and I can think of three areas in which the MSM might successfully change laws and regulations to hinder their blogger competitors:

1. Campaign Finance Reform -- Blog entries in support of a candidate could be considered political contributions to that candidate.
2. Libel Law -- The MSM used to fight aggressively against any expansion of libel law, but I predict this soon will change. The MSM can handle the burden of defending itself from libel suits much more easily than bloggers can.
3. Copyright Law -- Blogs often use information from other sources and, from what I have observed, sometimes flagrantly violate copyright laws.

The Democratic Party will likely assist the MSM in their attack on blogs, not because most blogs are pro-Republican but because blogs are not as consistently liberal as the MSM.

Roger Ailes blogs Here's a Tech Central Station column that's chock full of phony premises, logical fallacies, intellectual dishonesty, anti-intellectual dishonesty, old skool dishonest dishonesty, fabrication, projection, paranoia, hallucination and drivel. The thesis: The liberal "MSM" and the Democratic Party are going to conspire to change the law in order to destroy bloggers, oh yes they will, just you wait and see! This guy makes Michael Barone look honest and rational.

Pejman Yousefzadeh blogs A very thought-provoking column by James D. Miller. I am not sure if the whole of the Democratic Party is as anti-blog as he portrays it--after all, the Left Blogosphere has grown quite considerably in the past few years. But Miller is quite right to point out the mainstream media's antipathy towards the Blogosphere, and to warn that Big Media will not mind seeing the Blogosphere handicapped.

Betsy Newmark blogs John D. Miller has a depressing column about the "coming war on blogs." He theorizes that blogs will soon be vulnerable from laws affecting campaign contributions, libel, and copyrights. There may be some point to the last two, but the campaign contribution one really gets my goat.

Glenn Reynolds blogs He has some thoughts on how that might take place. More worries here. Meanwhile, note this stirring defiance from law professor blogger Tom Smith: "they can stop us from blogging and saying whatever we think, especially about political candidates, when they pry our keyboards from our cold, dead fingers."