The federal judge in the Oregon blogger defamation case came under a lot of heat for ruling that the negligence standard did not apply to the blogger Crystal Cox because she did not fit the categories of journalists in the state’s shield law.
But says Eric P. Robinson for the Citizen Media Law Project, that was not the main reason he ruled against Cox. “Instead, he [the judge] reached this conclusion [his ruling] because Cox tried to use the shield law to refuse to reveal her source, while at the same time trying to argue that since she had a source (who she would not identify), the libel lawsuit should be dismissed. This is specifically prohibited by Oregon’s shield law statute,” wrote Robinson. -db
From a commentary for the Citizen Media Law Project, April 9, 2012, by Eric P. Robinson.