Libel insurance for bloggers

Blogging can be a legally hazardous activity, especially if you are doing it independently. If a staff reporter for an established news organization is sued for libel, he or she is in for an exceedingly unpleasant experience — but at least the employer and its insurance company will pay to fight the charges or settle.

Last year I attended a conference at which the subject of bloggers and liability came up, and let’s just say that it was chilling, in all senses of the word. Right now Cape Cod Today blogger Peter Robbins is facing a libel suit. What too many bloggers fail to understand is that they are not exempt from libel laws. They just lack the means to fight back.

That’s why a new project by the Media Bloggers Association is so interesting. MBA president Robert Cox (in photo) has come up with a new program under which bloggers who take an online course in media law will be eligible to purchase libel insurance.

It’s not cheap — David Ardia of the Citizen Media Law Project, who helped write the online course, says that it will cost a minimum of $450 a year. A prominent local blogger who’s been corresponding with me about this looked into it and was told that, in his case, it might be almost twice that. But it’s a lot cheaper than losing your home, which is what many bloggers are unwittingly risking.

Cox is a longtime leader in legal issues facing the blogging community, and he deserves a lot of credit for bringing this program to fruition.

Photo (cc) by J.D. Lasica and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Try not to laugh

From today’s New York Times story on $6.6 billion in federal earmarks that Congress is moving toward approving:

Senator [Ted] Stevens got $2 million for the University of Alaska to study “hibernation genomics.”

Martha A. Stewart, director of federal relations for the university, said scientists were studying the hibernation of Alaskan ground squirrels and black bears. If medics could induce a state of hibernation in humans, she said, they might be able to increase the survival chances of wounded troops being evacuated from the battlefield.

Wouldn’t it be better if she’d just said scientists want to study hibernation, and Stevens got the money?

A weird, sad tale comes to an end

At least one chapter in the weird, sad tale of Tania deLuzuriaga has come to an end, as she has resigned from the Boston Globe. As you may know, deLuzuriaga was recently found to have exchanged inappropriate e-mails of a sexual nature with a high-ranking school official when she was a reporter for the Miami Herald.

Journalists know they can’t secretly carry on an affair with people they cover. At the Miami New Times, Kyle Munzenrieder reminds us of the great Abe Rosenthal rule: “You can fuck an elephant if you want to, but if you do you can’t cover the circus.” DeLuzuriaga’s ethical breach was a serious one.

But to the extent that some people at the Globe agitated for her to leave, as Christine McConville reported in the Boston Herald last week, I think her situation raises an ethical question for management, too: Should wrongdoing in a previous job be held against someone if she is performing competently and without incident in her current job?

I’ve done no independent reporting on this, and there may well be issues about which I’m not aware. But assuming deLuzuriaga kept her personal and professional lives separate while she was at the Globe, it strikes me that that should have been good enough.

Gender hypocrisy raises its ugly head, too. As Amy Derjue notes at Boston Daily, and Rick Sawyer observes at Bostonist, deLuzuriaga’s erstwhile and extremely married alleged paramour not only has paid no penalty, he just got a promotion. Nice.

What to look for tomorrow

Assuming McCain shows up, that is.

My Northeastern colleague Alan Schroeder, a leading expert on presidential debates, writes in the Politico about what McCain and Obama need to accomplish tomorrow night.

Schroeder’s bottom line: McCain is better than Obama in conversational settings, but he’s been inconsistent this year; and Obama is better than McCain at giving a speech, but has rarely showed the ability to seize the moment in unscripted settings.

Neither, he says, is a master of the debate form on the order of John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton or Schroeder’s latest addition to the pantheon — Hillary Clinton.

No help for their candidate

Maybe I’m reading to much into this. But if congressional Republicans wanted to help John McCain, wouldn’t they have slowed things down and tried to make it look like McCain’s parachute drop onto Capitol Hill was — well, if not exactly crucial, then at least helpful?

Instead, Republicans and Democrats have reportedly just about wrapped up the bailout legislation, leaving McCain looking foolish, and with nothing better to do Friday evening than to head to Mississippi for the first presidential debate.

Here’s a hilarious tidbit from the Politico:

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said that “nobody mentioned McCain” during the several-hour-long meeting on the $700 billion market rescue plan, other than Frank. “They winced when I did,” said Frank. He went on to compare Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to “Andy Kaufman and his Mighty Mouse: Here I am to save the day.”

I am amazed at how unsteady McCain’s behavior is compared to eight years ago — or, for that matter, eight months ago.

Time out on OT

The Boston Globe keeps adding to its roster of niche publications, which is smart. It plans to charge 50 cents for its new sports weekly, OT, which may not be so smart.

I could see something like OT being a howling success with advertisers if it were freely available. But I’m not sure people are going to lay out money for sports news that is not substantially different from what’s on the Web — even if OT is better written and more insightful, which it may well be with the likes of Charlie Pierce and Tony Massarotti writing for it.

We’ll see.

Wilkerson run would break no rules

Few observers of local politics are as astute as Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi. But I can’t agree with her that state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, D-Roxbury, is somehow breaking the rules because she will try to keep her seat with a write-in campaign if she doesn’t win the Democratic primary recount.

(Aside: I am referring only to the rules of running an independent campaign. I am not referring to the numerous tax and campaign-finance rules Wilkerson has broken over the years, which are the reason her political career may now be going down the drain.)

Wilkerson’s challenger, Sonia Chang-Díaz, may be the Democratic nominee (pending the recount results), but the rules allow Wilkerson to run as an independent, even though her name won’t appear on the ballot.

And though Wilkerson won’t be the party’s nominee, there is nothing to stop her from calling herself a Democrat (which seems to offend Vennochi), or a radical syndicalist, or Irene.

Vennochi tries to draw an unfavorable comparison between Wilkerson and U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., who was re-elected as an independent after he lost a Democratic primary race in 2006. Lieberman, Vennochi writes, had the “grace” to run “as a third-party candidate.”

But Lieberman took the same branding approach as Wilkerson, referring to himself as an “Independent Democrat,” which sounds like a Democrat, only better:

I remain a Democratic [sic] but I’m running as an Independent Democrat, which in some ways makes official what I’ve been for a long time. I’ve been an independent Democratic [sic]. [Note: I haven’t listened to the audio, but I assume those are transcription errors, not evidence that Lieberman can’t talk.]

Wilkerson’s free to run, and the voters are free to re-elect her or reject her. Those are the rules.

An offer Obama has to refuse

Let’s assume, for a moment, that there might actually be some substantive value to the presidential campaign being suspended so that John McCain and Barack Obama can lock themselves in a room until the financial crisis has been solved. How might it have been handled if McCain weren’t being entirely political?

Here’s an answer: McCain could have approached Obama quietly. If Obama agreed, they could make a joint announcement. If not, then McCain could go public and grab whatever political advantage was to be had.

So what actually happened? As best as we can tell, McCain announced publicly and unilaterally that he was going to suspend his campaign, blindsiding Obama — after spurning agreeing to Obama’s private request to issue a joint statement earlier today. Obama can’t go along, because he’d look weak and subservient. McCain knows that, which is why he made Obama an offer he has to refuse.

It’s a big gamble. McCain might end up looking ridiculous. His hope is that Obama will look crassly political instead.

On the merits, the whole thing strikes me as absurd. The White House and Congress are working on a bailout package that everyone involved seems to think will get done within days.

Friday’s scheduled presidential debate is not a sporting event that should be canceled on the grounds of misplaced priorities. It’s serious business, the business of democracy. Let’s get on with it.

Explaining an unexplained dip

The New York Times’ Steve Lohr today writes about the growing furor over executive pay, and the widening disparity between what top company officials make as compared to average workers.

But the story is accompanied by a chart, based on statistics from the Economic Policy Institute, that shows a huge dip in the disparity earlier in this decade. Today, according to the chart, the disparity is rising once again, though it has not yet reached the heights of 2000.

Nowhere in Lohr’s story is the blip explained. (Not that I’m blaming him — he probably had no idea that particular chart would be used to accompany his reporting.)

What’s the explanation? According to an Economic Policy Institute report from June 21, 2006:

The ratio surged in the 1990s and hit 300 at the end of the recovery in 2000. The fall in the stock market reduced CEO stock-related pay (e.g., options) causing CEO pay to moderate to 143 times that of an average worker in 2002. Since then, however, CEO pay has exploded and by 2005 the average CEO was paid $10,982,000 a year, or 262 times that of an average worker ($41,861).

OK, I suppose we could have figured that out. But someone at the Times should have seen that the chart did not perfectly match Lohr’s reporting that chief-executive compensation has risen from 35 times to 275 times that of the average worker since the 1970s. It’s true, but stuff happened in between, too.