My firm belief is that bloggers, assuming they remain within the reasonable limits of the law, should have the same First Amendment rights as mainstream journalists in the local and national press corps. This should also hold true in other countries, where perhaps the statutes have different names, but the need to facilitate open communication and dialogue still exists. The subject of bloggers and what legal rights are afforded them, comes up more and more in the mainstream discussion. Just last week, during the debate over the hack of Sarah Palin’s email, Bill O’Reilly of FOX News called for the arrest of the owners of WikiLeaks, for publishing the records of Palin’s email. As you can see below, even his own anchor, Megyn Kelly (known more for her short skirts than her reporting), disagrees with his imbecile notion that the WikiLeaks team should be “hauled away in cuffs.” Quite obviously, reporting news (assuming the reporter had no part in illegally obtaining the news), is protected under the First Amendment and O’Reilly embarrasses himself yet again by disagreeing with this fact (you can always tell when he’s on the losing side of an argument, because magically he’s out of time, when he should be responding and admitting he is wrong). Oh, and to boot, his site was hacked in retaliation for these comments. Apparently he thinks he’s smart or something… Does he not want protection from the law for all of the slanderous remarks he makes on his TV and radio shows?

John Timmer, of Ars Technica, has written a nice little piece discussing a couple of examples where bloggers have been prosecuted (or not) in various countries including Singapore, Malaysia and Morocco. The comments section to this article is also of interest, because the subject of scrutinizing a monarchy comes into play in Morocco. While Timmer discusses the court actions involved in these cases, there are a multitude of bloggers coming under greater scrutiny in other countries such as China and Russia where the bloggers never see the inside of a courtroom, or even the inside of a jail cell, as with this Russian blogger we reported on recently. The cops just shot him in the head while handcuffed in the back of the police car. Considering the growing trend of mainstream journalists blogging more, as well as bloggers being sourced where information which might not normally be available to the press, it would be wonderful if the mainstream media put more resources into reporting this subject of utmost importance to their future, as well as ours.

I’m not sure how many people in the States or elsewhere around the world, actually realize the importance of this story, but its significance bears repeating. Over the weekend a Russian blogger and webmaster was shot in the head while in police custody. As for most people who get shot in the temple with a gun, he died. The Russian police in the southern city of Ingushetia, acknowledged that there was an incident and initial reports mentioned a scuffle of sorts. How an unarmed man gets shot in the head in the backseat in a scuffle is a bit hard to fathom.

Most news organizations mentioned that Magomed Yevloyev ran the website ingushetiya.ru, that he was an outspoken critic of the Kremlin and Putin, and even mentioned that he was a journalist. While there is no excuse in any country for a journalist to die at the hands of the police (a gunshot wound to the “temple area” is not exactly a mistake), this is more significant than just that. Journalists critical of the Kremlin have died before (see this New York Times article for more background information), but this is the first time we can recall where a blogger has been targeted. Journalists are generally people who write in printed material, perhaps augmenting that online. However, for someone who writes solely online to get knocked off, this is a big step in the wrong direction for the Putinites.