I had told the folks at the DC Court back in November that their decision to credential bloggers - and provide WiFi to permit liveblogging - would be a pretty big news story. Turns out I was right. In fact, it may be safe to say that bloggers covering the Libby trial was a bigger story than the trial itself over the past week.
Since the Washington Post story ran I have done dozens of interviews - AP, Reuters, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal, Voice of America, Newsweek Russia, Nippon TV, and others. A story from the Portland Press Herald was turned into an AP story and that ran in places like USATODAY and lots of other newspapers. Another AP story also ran around the world.
While the coverage has generally been fantastic, two related issues came up in my interviews so I would like to address those issues here and hope folks in the media take note.
It really comes down to the different between a person being credentialed AS A BLOGGER and a person who is credentialed AS A REPORTER and then who publishes some of their reporting on their news organizations web site in a "blog style" or who submits some of their material to a blog.
Some news accounts made mention of blogging at the Enron trial in Houston; others that some non-MBA blogs were credentialed.
I was concerned when people began to question whether this was really the first time a federal court had credentialed bloggers for a trial as that claim, as it appeared in the Washington Post originated with me. For my own peace of mind, I want to be clear about my understanding and the basis for it.
Having been talking to federal judges and other officials in the federal courts system about this very topic for the past two years I have never heard of a single blogger being credentialed by a federal court. Over the past couple of years I have been a regular participant in the First Amendment Center's Justice & Journalism conferences which bring together federal judges (and others from the federal courts) with reporters who cover the courts. At these conferences, I have heard reporters talk about two federal trials where a blog was part of the media coverage - Enron and the Richard Scrushy/HealthSouth trial.
In both trials, the "bloggers" were reporters for newspapers. In each instance, they were credentialed based on being reporters for those papers. The "blogging" (really more like web-based reporter notebooks) was done on the newspaper's web sites. By my understanding, these are not instances of bloggers being credentialed by the court but reporters who were credentialed and then published some of the reporting on their paper's web site in a blog formatted web page. To me that is not the same as a person whose sole standing in the media is that they have a blog getting a media credential to cover a major trial.
At the most recent CCPIO gathering in Arizona this past August, I spoke on this topic to a room full of people from most if not all of the federal districts as well as about 2/3rd of the state supreme courts. CCPIO stands for Conference of Court Public Information Officers. I took the opportunity to ask whether anyone knew of a case of a blogger being credentialed by a court. No one in the room cited a single example of a blogger being credentialed in their court and none had heard of it happening in some other court.
Based on this and other information - and that this has been very much on my radar for the past couple of years - I have always understood that no blogger has ever been credentialed to cover a trial in federal court. I have always reflected that back to every person I have ever spoken with in the federal court system (and that would be well over 200 people). No one has ever corrected my understanding.
Just to be 1,000%, I called two of the people in the best position to know, senior officials in the public information office of the federal courts, as well as, people at the First Amendment Center, CNN, the Washington Post and the Houston Chronicle. They all confirmed my understanding.
On a related note, I have asked about reports that non-MBA blogs being credentialed for the trial including Firedoglake, Daily Kos and the Huffington Post. I had not been previously informed of any of this by the court but I made some inquiries today and learned that the court is interested in trying various approaches to incorporating bloggers into the media coverage, only one of which is allowing the Media Bloggers Association to submit a schedule of bloggers who will fill two seats assigned to us during the trial. I am not particularly concerned with who exactly is coming to cover THIS trial; my aim is to make sure folks in the media, in the courts and elsewhere understand that whatever interest those other blogs might have in the Libby trial - and that while our members may have their own reasons for wanting to cover the trial - the MBA, as an organization, has no particular interest in the Libby Trial per se except that it serves as a model for how the courts (and other institutions) might credential bloggers in the future.
On the main point of this post, let me just say that maybe people have a different understanding of "blog" and "blogger" and "credentials" than I do but when I say that the decision of the court to make seats available to the members of the Media Bloggers Association is a "first", what I mean is that this is the first time that the court is credentialing people AS BLOGGERS not AS REPORTERS working for a traditional news organization who might also publish on a blog (their own, that of a third party or the news organization through which they got the credential). On that score I am comfortable that my understanding is correct that this trial is "the first time".
The only thing that would worry me about my statements is if some blogger from Fargo (no offense to my friends in North Dakota) came out of the woodwork and said "hey, wait a minute, I was credentialed as a blogger, back in 2001". All I can say is that having spoken with and met with the vast majority of people who would know of some other case, and having not heard anything that contradicts my understanding, it is fair to say that this IS the first time that bloggers are being credentialed by a federal court. That said, if there IS anyone out there who was credentialed to a federal trial AS A BLOGGER I would like to hear from him or her.
