Stern Reprimand

I've got a confession to make. I've got a big-time crush. I'm talking weak-in-the-knees infatuation. But it's not Victoria Beckham, Cameron Diaz, Fiona Gow, or any other bewitching beauty setting my heart aflutter. No, it's Bart Sibrel, the Apollo moon landing debunker behind www.moonmovie.com, fadi420, the hemp conspiracist behind http://fadi420.wordpress.com/2007/01/25/the-marijuana-conspiracy/, and David Duke, the you-know-what behind www.whitecivilrights.com.

Last week I made my video blogging debut, with a piece about recently-released-from-prison journalist-rights icon Josh Wolf, who this week starts his first professional journalism job. He's got a paid blogging gig for which a sole commercial sponsor required him to sign a contract allowing the company to remove any items deemed objectionable.

My video blog post speculated that Wolf might have been setting himself up for corporate censorship by signing a contract allowing him to be censored by a commercial sponsor.

I've since come to believe the piece was misguided and based on incomplete information, thus enriching the Web's farfetchedness as described in Andrew Keen's new book, "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture," which attacks the sloppiness, error, and ignorance of the Internet. The book sits unread next to my computer, so I won't pretend to critique it. But my experience filing a misleading blog report about Wolf, then getting to know this smart, extraordinarily principled, observant blogger who's now joining the ranks of paid hacks, suggests that absorbing standout elements of the blogosphere may be the commercial media's best hope.

As vast handsful of you may know, SF Weekly launched a blog last week called The Snitch: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2007/06/josh_wolf_goes_corporate.php.

Eager to make the digital scene, I hooked up with ace videographer Vincent Martin and cornered Josh Wolf, the blogger who's gained fame as a martyr for journalistic independence, and filmed him discussing a new job where he'll blog for pay.

"It's not a lot of money. But it's not a lot of of work," Wolf explained.

Wolf, you'll recall, filmed a Mission District G-8 protest two years ago, and was subpoenaed by a grand jury to hand over his tapes in connection with an inquiry into the injury of a police officer, a story SF Weekly's Ryan Blitstein broke a year ago. (http://www.sfweekly.com/2006-04-19/news/should-journalist-josh-wolf-be-afraid/)

Wolf refused and was jailed for contempt. He was released from a Dublin detention facility April 3, after agreeing to post all his video recordings of the protest on the Internet.

During his seven and a half months of incarceration — the longest anyone has spent in jail protecting sources — bloggers and writers for newspapers hotly debated whether Wolf was a "true" journalist or just a blogger, and thus whether or not he was truly fit for status as a journalistic martyr. Cogniscenti fretted: was Wolf a journalist, or a blogger, or an activist, or an anarchist, or something else?

Wolf told me he simply thought that the FBI shouldn't be able to knock on your door and demand film from your camera.

So the amateur videographer, blogger, and committed civil liberatarian did his time.

"Jail is like going to your college dorm, except for you can't leave. There's no girls. And no class," Wolf recalled. "You revert back to a childhood type state. I played a lot of Monopoly, Scrabble, dominoes, and spades."

Once out, Wolf became a fortunate ex-con. Not long after tasting freedom, he got a paying gig. Wolf inked a for-pay blogging contract with a single as-yet-unnamed corporate sponsor, with the blog Media Sphere scheduled to go live June 12.

The sponsor is "a big tech company. If you guess which one, you'll probably get it right," Wolf told me June 2, explaining that the new contract's terms don't make him an employee of the corporation, but do allow the sponsor to censor any material it deems objectionable.

"At this point, I'm not concerned about it. I don't anticipate it happening. I think they know that if I'm willing to go to jail over protecting my work product, that I'm also probably willing to lose a contract to protect my integrity as well," Wolf said.

In my video blog post, I said Wolf's new arrangement is different than a journalist being edited by a magazine or newspaper editor, and that it was more along the lines of early television where shows had a single sponsor, and had a free hand in dictating content, such as requiring actors to smoke Chesterfield cigarettes.