Maine, Minnesota Cases Test Free-Speech Limits of Bloggers
The free-speech rights of bloggers in Maine and Minnesota are under fire in two legal cases that some observers fear could cripple citizen journalism.
In the Maine case, political blogger Dennis Bailey was fined $200 for violating a state law that excludes blogs and other Internet speech from the “news story” exemption to regulations regarding political speech. On March 10, the Maine Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of Bailey, saying the blogger should not “be punished for criticizing candidates or speaking out about political ideas.”
In the Minnesota case, a jury ordered blogger John Hoff to pay $60,000 to former community leader Jerry Moore. In June 2009, Hoff wrote a post on his blog – The Adventures of Johnny Northside – that accused Moore of involvement in a “high-profile fraudulent mortgage.” Moore was not charged in the mortgage case. Moore alleged the blog post was untrue and got him fired from the University of Minnesota, according to media reports, while Hoff insisted the post was true and well-documented.
“Just as with any other medium of communication, the regulation of blogging presents many important First Amendment issues,” First Amendment scholar David Hudson Jr. wrote in 2010 on the First Amendment Center’s website.
“Only time will tell where the legal lines will be drawn on whether bloggers are journalists, when anonymous bloggers can be unmasked and when public employees can be disciplined for the content of their expression made on a blog.”
One of the issues that has arisen in the Maine case is the freedom to blog anonymously.
Bailey, a political consultant, co-created The Cutler Files blog in 2010 to share information about gubernatorial candidate Eliot Cutler that he thought was being overlooked by mainstream media outlets. The blog no longer is online.
For professional reasons, Bailey wanted to keep his name off the blog. But Maine law requires political speakers to disclose their identity. By the state’s definition, Bailey was not entitled to anonymity when blogging. Maine election law requires certain political publications to include names of the people who create or finance them.
Unlike the federal government, Maine does not exempt blogs or other Internet communication from scrutiny under election laws. This means that when Bailey created and spent money on his political blog, he became accountable to state election regulators. If a professional member of the media had delivered the same information, any money spent on the news story would have been exempted from Maine election law, according to the Maine Civil Liberties Union.
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