PressEthic

There's been ongoing drama between UTEP football coach Mike Price and Sports Illustrated. Price sued SI for slander and defamation. They settled.

Now Time wants the whole thing thrown out, saying Price violated an agreement that would limit his public statements about the case. The ongoing slander and defamation battles are interesting, but not much of a dilemma: if it's true, shame on SI. If not, it's another football coach who wants to keep pretending the collegiate sports world is all innocence.

Much more intriguing is the debate this suit started about whether magazines deserve shield law protection. First the answer was no. Then it was maybe.

That federal judge's suggestion that SI could be protected was only because it could be argued that the magazine is a newspaper. That makes no sense. Then again, neither does Alabama's shield law singling out only newspapers and broadcasters.

Why can't magazines be protected?

Shield law debates are nothing new - from whether there should be a federal shield law to whether online journalists should be included. The fact that they vary so widely from state to state - that is, in the states that have them at all - doesn't make things easier.

Some of the statutes are quite clearly limited to traditional print and broadcast reporters while others are worded broadly enough that they most likely would be interpreted to cover online journalists.

Yet even in those "traditional" definitions, magazine journalists still may not equal their newspaper counterparts. Online journalists make the situation that much murkier.

There is a lot of gray in journalism. What do we really mean by truth? Objectivity? Fairness?

But we better agree on what a journalist is - on who we are. Or we won't have any protection at all.