Finally the Media Come to the Party - Because They're Scared


Major newspaper organizations have finally weighed in on the Apple v. Mac rumor-writers case, an Associated Press story says.

The news organizations, which include AP and eight of California's biggest newspapers, entered a court brief last week, requesting that internet publishers be permitted to retain the confidentiality of their sources.

Apple has launched lawsuits against 25 individuals, some of whom are internet journalists.

In an earlier hearing, Judge Kleinberg declared, in this instance, that bloggers and, by extension, on-line journalists, did not have the same kind of legal protection as mainstream media journalists.

"Recent corporate scandals involving Worldcom, Enron and the tobacco industry all undoubtedly involved the reporting of information that the companies involved would have preferred to remain unknown to the public," the media organizations' brief is quoted as saying in the article. "Just because a statute seeks to protect secrecy of such information does not mean that the First Amendment protections provided to the news media to inform the public are wiped away."

The brief's authors and supporters are Tribune Co.'s Los Angeles Times, Hearst Newspapers' San Francisco Chronicle, Knight Ridder Inc.'s San Jose Mercury News, The Copley Press Inc.'s San Diego Union-Tribune and Freedom Communications Inc.'s Orange County Register, and The McClatchy Co.'s Bee newspapers in Sacramento, Fresno and Modesto. Others in support are the California Newspaper Publishers Association and the nonprofit free speech organization California First Amendment Coalition.

Apple's only official comment was to declare that protecting its trade secrets was critical to its ability to innovate.

Analysis: Hesitant, but not too late. And, let's face it, despite their 'white knight' actions now, where were these guys from the beginning? It's only when it began to dawn upon them that their own precious NYT and LAT journalists might just be under threat, that they finally charged in.

And, after all, if the news media can't protect its sources, who can? This case has much wider implications than trade secrets or allegedly inducing people to reveal trade secrets: the real point is that if successive courts repeatedly uphold Kleinberg's kind of nonsense, then a lot more than a few bloggers will be threatened out of existence...