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France Says Non To Citizen Journalistes

By Brian Montopoli

May 8, 2007 / 1:38 PM EDT / CBS News

(AP Photo/Remy Gabalda)

There has been some debate over the riots that followed the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as French president and how significant they actually are. The riots have been covered by mainstream media outlets, but if you are looking for reports from citizen journalists, you're somewhat out of luck. That's because, as Matthew Sheffield notes, only professional journalists can legally broadcast the riots:

The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.

The law – which was proposed by Sarkozy when he was Minister of the Interior and went into effect in March – grew out of the rise of something called "happy slapping." That's when "a violent attack is filmed by an accomplice, typically with a camera phone, for the amusement of the attacker's friends," according to Peter Sayer of the IDG News Service.

Suppression of free speech? Charles Johnson thinks so. But the rise of citizen journalism can be problematic: As I noted last week, the presence of self-identified citizen journalists, some of whom were also protesters, may have contributed to the police's decision to beat journalists at the L.A. immigration riots.