News director threatens blogger, asks blogger to remove tweet

Sad, silly situation out of Oregon this week. The (currently) anonymous blogger behind Oregon Media Central was threatened with legal action over a tweet, by a news director.

The blogger heard about some embarrassing behind-the-scenes footage of the news staff that had been posted to YouTube by someone who presumably works at or used to work at the station, KOIN-TV.

By the time the blogger learned about the footage, it had already been removed from YouTube and the account that posted it had been deleted. So the blogger put out a tweet asking if anybody had seen it.

A few days later, the blogger got an e-mail from KOIN's news director that said:

The "kointastic behind the scenes video" lifted by one of your followers from YouTube, was stolen.

That is the property of KOIN Local 6. Kindly remove that posting and link so that we don't have to pursue legal action.

The blogger pointed out that this "kointastic" person was not one of his followers. He (or she) also pointed out that the link he posted in his tweet only went to a YouTube search results page showing no results.

The blogger writes:

Did a professional journalist and the leader of a news organization really have so little respect for others' free speech that she felt she could demand I delete a link and a question? And that legal threat! How gullible did she think I was to believe I had done anything even remotely illegal? I was completely offended.

The blogger exchanged e-mails with the news director for a few days, during which the news director showed no remorse and gave no apology for the legal threat against the blogger's First Amendment rights.

Oh, and the news director also made sure to say that Twitter isn't journalism:

And regarding whether I was practicing journalism when I wrote what I did on Twitter, she responded, "When? Publishing a tweet? No. Good journalism as you know is a lot more than pushing tweets. It seems that right now, you are trying to check facts and be accurate. That's journalism."

Isn't it bad enough when corporations abuse cease and desist orders and wrongly (and stupidly) threaten bloggers with legal action? Are news organizations going to start hitting bloggers with the silly lawsuit hammer now?

By the way, even Lawrence Lessig is on the blogger's side.

I asked copyright scholar and author Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford Law professor and founder of the university's Center for Internet and Society, if I could have ever been in any legal danger, regardless of whether the videos played. It was a straightforward case for him: "You aren't at risk because of a link," he said.

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