zlacker

I don't think the press should have special protections over ordinary citizens. the penalty for any unwarranted use of force should be increased to whatever you would want for journalists.

>>leetcr+(OP)
Yes!

Press is a thing people do, not a credential people have. All people should have freedom to observe and report on (to the extent they wish or do not wish to) actions of the state. Restricting that should have severe punishment.

>>dpeck+Z
Agreed, though be careful what you ask for. If you're not a publisher (press), you can't libel. Slander, sure. But libel, no.

>>leetcr+(OP)
Edit: I'm wrong. See below.

The reason they have special protection is because the constitution grants them special protection. The question of who is "the press" in this day and age where anyone can publish anything is certainly up for debate though.

>>ghouse+m1
IANAL, but it's my understanding that anything written and viewed by a third party is considered "published" wrt libel. so it's already trivially easy for an ordinary person to commit libel.

>>jedber+o1
> The reason they have special protection is because the constitution grants them special protection.

I'm not a lawyer, but it doesn't

> There is no precedent supporting laws that attempt to distinguish between corporations which are deemed to be exempt as media corporations and those which are not. We have consistently rejected the proposition that the institutional press has any constitutional privilege beyond that of other speakers.

Supreme court in citizen's united, internal quotation marks omitted. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf

> protections of the First Amendment do not turn on whether the defendant was a trained journalist, formally affiliated with traditional news entities, engaged in conflict-of-interest disclosure, went beyond just assembling others' writings, or tried to get both sides of a story.

9th circuit in Obsidian Finance Group, LLC v. Cox http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2014/01/17/12...

>>gpm+04
Fair enough, thanks for the info. Looks like I was wrong.

>>dpeck+Z
Press is a thing people do, not a credential people have. All people should have freedom to observe and report on (to the extent they wish or do not wish to) actions of the state. Restricting that should have severe punishment.

Social media platforms, take note!

>>stcred+qc
Social media platforms should also have that right. And in fact they do:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23408093

>>gpm+04
I mean I suppose the argument could be that they are afforded special protections because they are acting as press (i.e. at the protests primarily to document and report events). But the constitution protects peaceable assembly as well as the freedom of the press, so it's hard to see how this case would turn on that.