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Sotomayor’s Mixed First Amendment Record

richard

"Yes" on Right of Access, Mostly "No" to FOIA Requests

An analysis of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial opinions on First Amendment issues concludes that while Sotomayor has an abundance of judicial experience, "it is surprising to see that no clear standard on First Amendment issues has emerged from her many cases.

"However, this is primarily due to the small number of such cases that she has heard," the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said Wednesday night.

"When confronted with the question of public and press access to the judicial system, she has favored the right of access. But her Freedom of Information Act cases tend to favor withholding records from requesters.

"However, she did have one notable order releasing the suicide note of former deputy White House counsel Vince Foster."

The report also notes that, "As a District Court judge, Sotomayor wrote the opinion in Tasini v. New York Times, a case that was eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

"In 1993, a group of six freelance authors sued the New York Times Company, Newsday, Inc., and Time, Inc., claiming that the print publishers had infringed upon the writers’ copyrights when the publishers licensed rights to copy and sell articles to computerized databases such as Lexis/Nexis. The media companies argued that they were authorized to reproduce the articles as a ‘collective work’ under the federal Copyright Act.

"Sotomayor sided with the media companies in holding that the writers did not have a copyright interest in the articles.

"Instead, Sotomayor held that electronic versions are ‘revisions’ of the original articles which are covered by the publishers’ copyright interest in the collective work of the periodicals.

"The case was one of the first applying the collective work provision of the Copyright Act to modern electronic technology, Sotomayor noted. In the 24-page opinion, Sotomayor analyzed in detail the text and intent of the Copyright Act.

". . . The case was appealed to the Second Circuit, which overturned the decision, and held that the reproduced articles were new works, and not revisions included in a collective work. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Second Circuit 7-2, ruling that the authors had copyright interests in the electronic editions of their works."

Earlier, "The White House put a handful of legal scholars on the phone with reporters Wednesday to talk about the president’s pick," John Eggerton reported¬†for Broadcasting & Cable.

"Paul M. Smith, a partner at Jenner & Block and a former classmate of Sotomayor’s who has argued Free Speech cases before the high court, said that when it came to Free Speech issues, she ‘does not come into cases with a broad, doctrinal bias, but instead takes each case as it comes and looks very closely at the details and the facts to decide which way the constitutional analysis ought to go.’

"He cited two speech cases she decided. One, he said, involved a police officer who was fired from his job for engaging in private bigoted and offensive speech, off hours, to private parties anonymously. Two of the three judges voted to affirm the dismissal of his First Amendment claim, finding it was ‘perfectly constitutional’ to fire him for that private speech. Judge Sotomayor dissented, he said." ‘She said: ‘not so fast. It is a pretty radical idea to fire a public employee for private, off-hours expression. I think we should let this case go to trial.’"

Sotomayor’s nomination was international news.

"Unsurprisingly, today’s reports mostly celebrate the historic nature of the nomination, with Sotomayor’s life story taking overwhelming precedence," Jane Kim wrote¬†on Tuesday for Columbia Journalism Review.

"The Los Angeles Times headlines its story, ‘Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor rose from humble roots.’ The New York Times opens with those roots as well, writing that Obama chose ‘a daughter of Puerto Rican parents raised in a Bronx public housing project to become the nation’s first Hispanic justice.’ Similarly, in its lede, USA Today states that her confirmation would give the court ‘for the first time in nearly two decades, the experience of an individual from a truly humble background.’"

. . . Geraldo Got "Goosebumps" With the Nomination

"When Geraldo Rivera heard today that Sonia Sotomayor was the Supreme Court nominee, he saw the light," Gail Shister reported Tuesday on the TV Newser Web site.

"Literally.

"The Fox News host was so excited about the high court’s first Hispanic nominee that he leapt from his chair in his home office and bopped his head on a low-hanging light fixture.

"’This is as important to us as Obama was to the African American community. I have goosebumps,’ says Rivera, 65, born to a Catholic, Puerto Rican father and Jewish mother. He defines himself as the former.

"In an interview from his North Jersey home, Rivera says there’s only been a few times in his life he felt this pumped: When the Mets won their first World Series; when he passed his bar exam and when his kids were born. (He has five, ages 3 to 29.)

"’It finally happened. Wow. Look how the Puerto Rican community came up with someone so world-class,’ says Rivera of Sotomayor, 54, a federal Appeals Court judge in New York and the product of a South Bronx housing project.

"The nomination of [Sotomayor] will help dispel, in Rivera’s view, ‘the whole poverty-pimp mentality that afflicts the Puerto Rican community in New York. Elected officials go around blaming "the man."’

Fellow student Lisa Jack shot a roll of film of Barack Obama as an Occidental College freshman. (credit: Lisa Jack/Contour by Getty Images)

NBC to Air "Inside the Obama White House" Special

"Brian Williams anchors an NBC News special "Inside the Obama White House" which will air in one-hour installments next Tuesday and Wednesday night at 9pmET/PT," Steve Krakauer wrote for the TV Newser Web site.

"More than a dozen crews and cameras will be placed throughout the White House this Friday. And Williams will interview Pres. Obama next Tuesday, the day before the president leaves for a trip to the Middle East and Europe.

"This is the seventh installment over the last 40 years of this NBC News series."

Meanwhile, Lisa Jack, a student with Obama at Occidental College when the future president was a freshman, is exhibiting 21 of the 36 photos on a roll of film she took then, plus a blow-up of her original contact sheet, in "Barack Obama: The Freshman," an exhibition opening Thursday at M+B Gallery in West Hollywood, Calif., according to Mike Boehm, writing Wednesday in the Los Angeles Times.

Nine were first published in Time magazine’s December "Person of the Year" spread on Obama.

"Jack rummaged for the long-ignored negatives in her Minneapolis basement early in 2008, after it became clear Obama was a serious contender for the presidency. The callow kid kicking back on a couch in a living room near L.A.’s Occidental College, where he and Jack were students, may not have been the image the Obama campaign wanted to project."

Relations Between Pacifica, N.Y. Station in Turmoil

Pacifica Radio, which moved in April to "secure our broadcast signals" at its five politically and culturally "progressive" stations around the country, has replaced the leadership of WBAI-FM in New York.

"So far in the last few weeks the National Board has removed the station manager and the Program Director at WBAI, forced out the Program Director at KPFK and the News Director of Informativo, fired the Chief Financial Officer of the foundation. They are also secretly considering the removal of the station managers at KPFA and WPFW," Bernard White, ousted as WBAI program director, charged on the Web site of a group called Take Back WBAI Radio.

KPFK is in Los Angeles and WPFW is in Washington. Informativo Pacifica describes itself as "A half-hour national and international news program in Spanish, with reports from contributors in more than 30 countries of the Americas and Europe." Grace Aaron, interim executive director of Pacifica, could not be reached for comment on White’s assertion.

Both sides in the WBAI dispute agree that the station is in dire financial straits, but they disagree about who is to blame. Disputes between the feisty, listener-supported Pacifica stations and their national leadership are nothing new, and have led to "takeovers" by one side or the other.

A story by John Tarleton in the New York-based Indypendent, which describes itself as a labor of love by citizen journalists, begins, "When WBAI-99.5 FM’s new acting General Manager Lavarn Williams visited the tally room during the first week of the station’s May fund drive, she was surprised to find pledge cards that had not been handed over to the fund drive supervisor four hours after the pledges had originally been received from the left-leaning radio station’s listeners.

"For Williams, keeping better track of pledge cards is only one part of a much larger push to transform a venerable, left-wing radio station that faces a slew of problems including more than a million dollars in debts, declining audience and membership, the threat of eviction from its downtown office and a backlogged premiums fulfillment process that has angered many of the station’s supporters.

". . . Williams’ arrival is being cheered by those who believe the station has been mismanaged but others warn that the station’s longstanding commitment to racial inclusion is at risk, noting that WBAI’s General Manager Tony Riddle and Program Director Bernard White, both of whom are African-American, have already been removed from their posts." Williams is African American as well. 

Asian Journalists to Honor Eng, Lee, Park, Paulus

Dinah Eng, columnist for Scripps Howard News Service; Corky Lee, freelance photojournalist; Jeannie Park, former editor, Time Inc.; and Steve Paulus, senior vice president/general manager of NY1 News, are recipients of four of the Asian American Journalists Association’s top awards for 2009, the group announced¬†on Friday.

The association said, "Eng’s founding of The Executive Leadership Program has developed 381 Asian American and Pacific Islander newsroom leaders who have propelled AAJA to national prominence. She has worked tirelessly to promote diversity by training, mentoring and encouraging promotions of journalists to reach their highest potential. Her influence with media executives has made it possible for the program to exist year after year.

"For over 35 years, Corky Lee has used his camera to ensure that the faces of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and their experiences be included in American history.

"Jeannie Park brings both wisdom and grace to everything she does, while increasing the diversity among the staffs of every publication she’s headed from InStyle to People magazine. She has mentored and advised countless young members of AAJA, who aspire to executive offices.

"Steve Paulus has been instrumental in hiring at least 35 Asian American and Pacific Islanders over 20 years at NY1 News and WCBS-TV. He has also hired dozens more at Time Warner’s upstate New York channels."

6 Blacks on List of Magazine’s "Top" 50 D.C. Journalists

Four years ago, Washingtonian magazine was panned by journalists of color when its list of the "50 Best and Most Influential Journalists" in the capital included only two people of color — both columnists.

The list’s compiler, Garrett M. Graff, was then a 24-year-old who had arrived in D.C. only two years earlier after graduating from Harvard.

This year’s "Top Journalists" list, Graff’s first since 2005 and first as executive editor of the magazine, includes six black journalists, though still no Latinos, Asian Americans or Native Americans.

The six: Gwen Ifill of PBS, Michele Norris of National Public Radio, Washington Post columnists Eugene Robinson, Michael Wilbon and Colbert I. King, and Helene Cooper, a New York Times White House correspondent. Robinson and Wilbon were on the 2005 list.

Separately, Dean Baquet, New York Times Washington Bureau chief, is listed among the "movers and shakers behind the scenes"; public radio host Kojo Nnamdi of WAMU-FM is one of 12 "anchors strong and steady," and the "rising stars" include Jonathan Capehart, Washington Post editorial writer, and Hawaii-raised Yunji De Nies, an ABC News White House correspondent.

Graff’s list, which appears in the June issue, which was "compiled based on interviews with dozens of the Washington journal-ism establishment, is biased toward reporters who will shape our views of the Obama era," he wrote.

They are not ranked by "influence," though Graff does call columnist Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times "arguably Washington‚Äôs most powerful journalist. . . . Tom Friedman‚Äôs books have done more to shape the way business thinks about globalization ‚Äî and more recently, ‘green’ technology ‚Äî than just about anything said by any corporate leader."

A report last year for Unity: Journalists of Color on the number of full-time reporters, correspondents, columnists, bureau chiefs and editors who cover Washington for U.S. daily newspapers found that while there were three journalists of color heading major news operations in the nation’s capital in 2004, there was just one in 2008: Baquet.

In addition, the 2008 study showed that only 15 of
122 editors — including desk editors, bureau chiefs and online producers — were journalists of color, just over 12
percent.

Hearing Urged on Radio Performance Royalties

"Broadcasters and civil rights leaders have sent a joint letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) asking him to set a public hearing on the potential consequences of the Performance Rights Act for minority- and female-owned radio broadcasters." Radio Ink reported on Tuesday.

"Leahy is a sponsor of the Performance Rights Act, the House version of which has already been approved by the House Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by PRA sponsor John Conyers (D-MI). Conyers went ahead with a committee vote on the bill despite requests for a hearing from civil rights groups and minority broadcasters.

The letter is signed by Bustos Media President/CEO Amador Bustos, Spanish Broadcasting System Chief Revenue Officer Frank Flores, Spanish Radio Association Director Frank Montero, Minority Media and Telecommunications Council Exec. Director David Honig, American Women in Radio and Television President Maria Brennan, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law Exec. Director Barbara Arnwine, and Rainbow/PUSH Coalition founder/President Rev. Jesse Jackson.

What About Journalists Held by the United States?

"If Iran Freed [Roxana] Saberi, Why Won’t the US Release Journalist Ibrahim Jassam?" Jeremy Scahill, author and journalist often heard on Pacifica Radio’s "Democracy Now!" writes on his Rebel Reports¬†blog.

"It is already a de facto US policy to target journalists. The US has consistently attacked journalists and media organizations in modern wars. In the 1999 US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, General Wesley Clark, then the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, ordered an airstrike on Radio Television Serbia, killing 16 media workers, including make-up artists and technical staff, an action Amnesty International labeled a ‘war crime.’ Richard Holbrooke, who is currently Obama‚Äôs point man on Afghanistan and Pakistan, praised that bombing at the time.

"The Obama administration has recently paid a lot of lip service to freedom of the press, particularly around the case of Iranian-American journalist [Roxana] Saberi, who was released May 11 from an Iranian prison. Yet, the US military continues to hold journalists as prisoners without charges or rights in neighboring Iraq. Ibrahim Jassam, a cameraman and photographer for Reuters has been a US prisoner in Iraq since last September despite an Iraqi court’s order last year that he be freed."

Trahant Among 9 Awarded Kaiser Fellowships in Health

Paula Andalo, managing editor of El Tiempo Latino in Washington; Sindya N. Bhanoo, San Francisco-based freelance contributor to the Washington Post Health section; Monique Fields, metro reporter at the Birmingham (Ala.) News; Mark N. Trahant, freelance journalist, Maynard Institute board chairman and former editorial page editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which folded its print edition in March; and Anita Wadhwani, freelance journalist in Nashville, Tenn., are among nine journalists awarded a Kaiser Media Fellowship in Health, the program announced on Wednesday.

The fellows "engage in group site visits focused on health policy issues and attend special briefings with leading health policy experts and practitioners to increase their understanding of current health policy issues, while working on in-depth reporting projects on a variety of policy-related topics. The Fellows will also receive training in multimedia reporting techniques," a news release said.

Andalo is to study the role community clinics play in providing care for Hispanic immigrants; Bhanoo, balancing the benefits of electronic medical records with privacy concerns; Fields, the Mental Health Parity Act and its impact on mental health care in Alabama; Trahant, the Indian Health Service and its relevance to the national health reform debate; and Wadhwani, cuts to the TennCare program and the impact on patients.

"The fellowship projects can take as long as nine months or as little as a few months to complete, but all fellows participate in site visits and seminars throughout the year. Stipends are awarded based on the length of the fellowship, up to $55,000 for a nine-month period. The program also covers expenses, such as travel and computer equipment, based on the needs of the project," the announcement said.

Andalo is from Argentina; Trahant is a member of the Shoshone-Bannock tribes; Fields is African American and Bhanoo and Wadhwani are South Asian, executive director Penny Duckham said.

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