Alex Beam, a Boston Globe columnist who frequently makes me uncomfortable because of the personal nature of his attacks, today holds his fellow journalists’ feet to the fire for not making a bigger deal about Apple’s suit against Nicholas Ciarelli, a blogger who published “trade secrets.”

Ciarelli is accused of doing exactly what reporters all over America are supposed to be doing: finding and publishing information that institutions don’t want to reveal. Do you think the Pentagon would have released additional details about football hero Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire in Afghanistan unless pressed by Washington Post reporters? No, I don’t think so either. To think that a 19-year-old man should face trial for engaging in behavior that is the cornerstone of our democracy is sickening.

He then uses this failure to attack one of his consistent targets, Harvard, this time because the Nieman Foundation hasn’t taken a stand on the issue.

Of course, Beam tilts the playing field by introducing Ciarelli as a “19-year-old journalist,” not as a blogger. The last thing I want to do is open up that fruitless debate — remind me to blog about Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory some more — and I don’t know if bloggers should have precisely the same protections as journalists. So I ask the question differently: What’s better for our democracy? And in this case, having a Big Company sue a Little Guy for publishing stuff that they wouldn’t have sued a Big Company like The Globe for strikes me as bad for democracy. [Technorati tags: apple media ciarelli blogs]

Categories: Uncategorized dw