Newt Gingrich set off a s*itstorm on Twitter this afternoon when he tweeted against Florida State Senate Bill 1316, which he called insane and embarrassing. I posted here a few days ago about a bill which would require bloggers to register with the state as though they were lobbyists and disclose how much money they made per post. Failure to do so would result in stiff fines of up to $2,500 and penalties for not paying the fines of up to $50 a day.
This is the same press-hating Gingrich (remember when he ran for president, how he lashed out at the media?) who loves Fox News.
Retribution was swift. Blaise Ingoglia is another Florida State Senator, not the one proposing the bill but obviously he’s standing up for it. But not for long, he got routed very quickly by two journalists.
The crux of the issue is that the bill insists that blogging is the same as lobbying and it simply is not. Here’s what one blogger has to say.
“Lobbyists need to tell everyone what bill they are being paid to influence.” Bloggers are NOT lobbyists! The definition of a lobbyist is “a person who takes part in an organized attempt to influence legislators.” We are NOT being paid by anybody to influence a damn thing! We are reporting news and posting opinion pieces on the internet for the consumption of the general public and if we break news timely and/or our commentary is up to snuff, people come and read us and the ad revenue on the blog pays the costs of doing business and gives us some money to put in our pocket so we can continue our work.
And there is no “organized attempt” to influence legislators or anybody else except in the black helicopter fever dreams of Florida Senate MAGAs. There are no secret back room deals where some cigar smoking denizen plays assignment editor and bloggers scurry off in the night to their laptops to follow the directive of their Deep State overlord.
We are not in the employ of a corporation or PAC to achieve a prearranged result. That is a paranoid presupposition and it’s just plain wrong. We are small business owners (or independent contractors for same) and we believe in our work. We are political activists, yes, but blogging is not analogous to lobbying, it fails the definition, element by element. A first year law student would be laughed out of class for proposing this and yet it’s a bill in committee in the Florida State Senate. Newt Gingrich is right, 100%. The bill is insane and to conflate blogging with lobbying is an embarrassment, it is so inapposite and off the walls.
Patrick Watson is an economics journalist.
Paul Blythe is a retired reporter and editor, a veteran of 37 years in the field and his former paper is in Florida.
Wow. The authors of the Federalist Papers were the first bloggers.
I see no way that this bill is going anywhere. Absolutely none.
And the irony of Newt Gingrich, of all people, coming to the defense of liberal bloggers is not lost on me. I’m keeping an eye out as the political blogs weigh in and I’ll update this post with meaningful input if and when I see it.
