Journalist Or "Person With A Video Camera"?
Today, his story lands in the Washington Post, where Howard Kurtz looks at the question at the very core of Wolf's case: Is a blogger a journalist?
He's spent the last six months in a California prison for refusing to comply with a court order to turn over a video he shot of a violent San Francisco protest during a G-8 summit meeting. Wolf posted a portion of the video on his blog and sold some of it to local television stations. And his rationale for withholding it "is less than crystal clear," writes Kurtz, since he isn't really protecting any confidential sources, as was the case with Judy Miller of the New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle reporters who recently avoided a prison sentence after their source came forward.
According to Wolf, "There was a trust established between people involved in the organization that I was covering and myself . . . that what I chose to release was what I chose to release, and that I wasn't an investigator for the state."
As far as the U.S. Attorney prosecuting him is concerned, Wolf needs "to come to grips with the fact that he was simply a person with a video camera who happened to record some public events."
But a classification as a journalist would probably not do Wolf any good anyway; his is a federal case and there are no federal shield laws for journalists.
Wolf has "repeatedly lost in the courts," including an appeal to the 9th Circuit, which upheld the grand jury's request for his testimony. Failing a solution from a mediation session today, "he will likely remain imprisoned at least until the current grand jury's term expires in July."