Charles Johnson (who has an excellent first name, by the way) cites this article in which David Broder complains about the journalistic bar being lowered and all the riff-raff getting in. He asks how long it will be before Broder calls for blogs to be regulated.
I’m wondering how blogs might be regulated. A blog does not differ in any substantial way from a personal homepage, or personal messages posted in an online mailing list. I don’t see how anyone can regulate blogs without imposing similar regulation on any other form of personal communication over the internet.
Now there is a possible way out: Gun control advocates have argued, among other things, that the Second Amendment was written when no one had imagined such things as rapid-fire assault weapons, armor piercing bullets, or any of a number of other modern innovations. Some folks have said the Second Amendment properly assures only the right to keep and bear muzzle-loading single-shot weapons, like muskets.
I believe this interpretation has been pretty much abandoned, though I’d want to see what a lawyer has to say about it.
But if that argument has any merit in the issue of gun rights, it makes as much sense to argue that the framers of the Constitution never imagined the electronic media — a case which would be much harder to refute than the argument about high-capacity and high-rate-of-fire weapons.
In other words, stealing a page from the gun control advocates, we could claim First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech apply only to unamplified speech on a street corner or similar forum. We could also claim freedom of the press applies only to newspapers published using techniques substantially like those employed by Ben Franklin.
Of course, that opens a six-pack of canned worms with respect to the Fourth amendment…
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