This is certainly scary, although it should scare some of the progressive trolls whose content is built on innuendo and libel.

In a case that’s sending a frightening message to the blogger community, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that a blogger must pay $2.5 million to an investment firm she wrote about — because she isn’t a real journalist.

As reported by Seattle Weekly, Judge Marco A. Hernandez said Crystal Cox, who runs several blogs, wasn’t entitled to the protections afforded to journalists — specifically, Oregon’s media shield law for sources — because she wasn’t “affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system.”

The Obsidian Finance Group sued Cox in January for $10 million for writing several blog posts critical of the company and its co-founder, Kevin Padrick. Obsidian argued that the writing was defamatory. Cox represented herself in court.

The judge threw out all but one of the blog posts cited, focusing on just one (this one), which was more factual in tone than the rest of her writing. Cox said that was because she was being fed information from an inside source, whom she refused to name.

Without the source, she couldn’t prove the information in the post was true — and thus, according to the judge, she didn’t qualify for Oregon’s media shield law since she wasn’t employed by a media establishment. In the court’s eyes, she was a blogger, not a journalist. The penalty: $2.5 million.

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In case you didn’t know it, Linda Greenhouse covers the Supreme Court for the New York Times. Not surprisingly, her coverage has long been infused with her leftist agenda, during which she has sometimes confused her personal beliefs with her professional obligations, leading to her 1989 reprimand by the Times for participating in an abortion-rights march and her own domestic conflicts of interest via her husband, Eugene Fidell.

An honest newspaper would have fired her long ago, or re-assigned her to the bridge column or the Mets, but no: today she is the Times’s “emeritus” Supreme Court correspondent.

Now she’s weighed in — in an utterly impartial New York Times sort of way — on the Arizona “illegal aliens” controversy. And guess which side she’s on?

I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon.

Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.

What would Arizona’s revered libertarian icon, Barry Goldwater, say about a law that requires the police to demand proof of legal residency from any person with whom they have made “any lawful contact” and about whom they have “reasonable suspicion” that “the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States?” Wasn’t the system of internal passports one of the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa?

Right… Arizona is now a “police state,” akin to the U.S.S.R. and South Africa. On the Upper West Side, maybe, but OK… (more…)

The media has been trying its hardest to spin this tough new Arizona immigration law for all it’s worth. It’s such a swarm of media agenda journalism that even liberal reporters who write about the travel industry are trying to demonize Arizona over it all.

We can see this in the facile reporting by USA Today’s travel reporter, Barbara De Lollis. Her story, “Arizona immigration law backlash? Traveler says state ‘is off my travel list for sure,’” is a screamer for the wild assumptions and unproved and unprovable assertions made in order to further the Old Media agenda.

De Lollis asserts that there is a “backlash” among travelers over the Arizona legislature’s decision to strengthen its immigration laws. She thinks that the tourist industry in the Grand Canyon State will find itself on the short end of the stick because of “the USA’s toughest immigration law.” (more…)

Just last Wednesday, the news broke that a Birmingham PlannedParenthood clinic was put on a year-long probation. The Alabama State Health Department had opened an investigation into the clinic after Live Action released an undercover video, showing clinic staffers covering up sexual abuse and skirting the parental consent law.

When our team of student journalists investigated the Birmingham clinic a year and a half ago, I was posing as a 14-year-old girl impregnated by my 31-year-old “boyfriend.”  When I told the clinic workers I was 14 and didn’t want my parents to find out about my abortion, the staffer responded that someone with “the same last name” could give permission for my abortion—directly contrary to Alabama’s parental consent law.

After they heard my “boyfriend” was 31, they told me to speak to Dr. Desiree Bates, the clinic manager. Bates, they said, “does bend the rules a little bit” and “whatever you tell us stays within these walls.” Our investigators have seen firsthand that Planned Parenthood routinely breaks laws meant to protect underage girls. (more…)