Great Kentucky Blog Ban Rumbles into Court

When is a reporter not a reporter?

The answer: when he/she writes for a blog, according to Kentucky officials.

Back in June, Kentucky’s administration abruptly banned state employees from reading blogs. They claimed that it wasn’t censorship — but the proprietor of the blog BluegrassReport.org, Mark Nickolas, sued (pdf) in July, claiming that the government censored Nickolas and other blogs because they were critical of Gov. Ernie Fletcher’s (R) administration.

A recent motion (pdf) by Nickolas discloses emails between Kentucky administration officials showing what is an apparently very low opinion of blogs. In deciding whether to reply to one reporter’s query, one official wrote to another, “John prefers that I not to respond to bloggers since they not reports (sic).” When another official figured out that whoever was calling was actually from a publication of the National Journal Group, and thus deemed worthy of their response, the other responded, “I’ll call him then.”

Nickolas’ motion argues that this fragile distinction of what is and is not a reporter amounts to arbitrary censorship. As the motion reads (p. 18):

By targeting only a particular segment of the media known for its provocative style, the state’s policy threatens to “distort the market for ideas” and to “hinder the press as a watchdog of government activity.” At the very least, the arbitrary and illogical policy of singling out blogs for special treatment, which happens to have its greatest impact on a longtime critic of a governor under indictment for political discrimination, is “structured so as to raise suspicion that it was intended to” interfere with protected speech. [case citations omitted]

Back in June, when I’d called and asked a Kentucky technology official about the rationale for the ban, I was told that the ban wasn’t selective; it was a general policy blocking all blogs, and meant to increase worker productivity. Nevertheless, a conservative blog was subsequently unblocked by the administration, and the policy explicitly allowed blogs that were attached to newspapers and other media organizations.

Why? I was told that newspapers “are more likely to have ‘some value, some relevance to somebody’s job'” and that “blogs are generally aligned with certain ‘interest groups.'”

Of course, readers of TPMmuckraker (one of the blocked sites) know that we are only interested in muck.