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.

Related posts:

1. NYT uses anony­mous source to expose anony­mous blog­ger but gets it wrong
2. In which the author sum­ma­rizes the authority-based tweet debate and then finds some­thing new to write about
3. Charlie Brooker — How To Report The News
4. There’s no excuse not to link to news sources | Joe Ruiz
5. Twitter Hype Fail