Not public figures
See: Gertz v. Welch, Inc. and Eastern Europe
I just flew back from Prague and boy are my arms tired.
I’ve been gone a month. I was blissfully disengaged in the nonsense, bullshittery and gamesmanship of US media/news for a glorious month.
Instead, I was able to do serious training on issues impacting journalists and others in Eastern Europe and Eurasia (Europe is a construct not a continent but I digress). While I was in Prague a Cambodian colleague and journalist Mech Dara was arrested and imprisoned, a Belarusian journalist friend went into exile in Vilnius, two Ukrainian lawyers and a Ukrainian journalist at Kyiv Independent said the best part of coming to Prague (one for a documentary film screening, the others at the legal institute with me) wasn’t the breathtaking architecture of the city of spires.
It was getting to sleep through the night.
Americans and much of the west (including the current Western European generation) have no idea what torturous hell it is to wake nightly to another siren and decide if you are going to move to the interior of your apartment or head to the bomb shelter.
Such is life.
Thank god nothing has changed around this dump, though. There’s a lot journalistic hand wringing over the state of affairs in the US - certainly, I won’t downplay the Trump created threats journalists and others face - but I’ll be damned if I didn’t scroll across a journalist and instructor proclaiming that journalist’s are in fact public figures.
Speak for yourself.
Journalists are not public figures. We simply aren’t unless we declare ourselves to be by putting ourselves to the forefront of some group, organization or inserting ourselves into highly visible positions.
Definitionally - we don’t make the cut. And we shouldn’t. The idea that I’m a public figure is asinine. No one cares what I say or think - they really don’t. My work as a journalist doesn’t seek to make a splash or name for myself. Most journalists don’t care about bouquets and public adoration.
We just want to be left alone to do our work and get paid accordingly.
There is a good working definition of “public figure” from a 1974 SCOTUS case Gertz v. Welch, Inc. (sited to this case see: New York Times v. Sullivan for legal discretion):
“Those classed as public figures stand in a similar position. Hypothetically, it may be possible for someone to become a public figure through no purposeful action of his own, but the instances of truly involuntary public figures must be exceedingly rare. For the most part, those who attain this status have assumed roles of especial prominence in the affairs of society. Some occupy positions of such persuasive power and influence that they are deemed public figures for all purposes. More commonly, those classed as public figures have thrust themselves to the forefront of particular public controversies in order to influence the resolution of the issues involved. In either event, they invite attention and comment.”
The ego on some menfolk in positions of journalistic power to think that all of us are somehow reflected in the definition laid out in Gertz (which BTW is what PBS uses as the definition of public figure for it’s guidelines both in reporting on [person] and reporting as a person.
I’ve been scolded by one ironically mustachioed Iowa journalist as a “public figure” to wit he put me on blast for daring to ask him a question (IPR I’m looking at you) and continued to act like Pat from Kim Reynolds office (IYKYK). I requested he go fuck himself. That was a couple years ago and now I see it turn up in a presentation by an U of I adjunct. I’m not going to name him as I am still considering reaching out to him and asking WTF?
As of now I’m more concerned about the Georgian elections, the crumbling of Hungary and Slovakia under totalitarian a-holes and being generally furious over the West looking away from what is happening in Eastern/SEE/Eurasia.
Well, the way things are going we’ll know soon enough when Putin decides it’s time to re-occupy the former eastern bloc.