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The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved House Bill 4770, which among other things, attempts to define what a journalist is to restrict access to motor vehicle accident reports for a period of 30 days after the accident. The measure is part of three-bill package aimed at impeding so-called “ambulance chasing” law firms. Within the package, the legislation is apparently an attempt to deny "ambulance chasers” quick access to accident reports. However, in that effort the bill sets out to define what does and doesn’t qualify as a “news publication.” “Government cannot license who speaks,” said attorney and MLive columnist...

Matt Drudge called Sen. Dianne Feinstein a fascist after the California Democrat suggested that only "professional" journalists deserved protection under a new media shield law."I can't support it if everyone who has a blog has a special privilege … or if Edward Snowden were to sit down and write this stuff, he would have a privilege. I'm not going to go there," Feinstein said during Thursday's hearing.Drudge reacted to Feinstein's comments on Twitter after stories of the media shield law were highlighted on his Drudge Report website."Comments from Sen. Feinstein yesterday on who's a reporter were disgusting," he wrote, adding...

The vote was 13-5 for a compromise defining a "covered journalist" as an employee, independent contractor or agent of an entity that disseminates news or information. The individual would have been employed for one year within the last 20 or three months within the last five years. It would apply to student journalists or someone with a considerable amount of freelance work in the last five years. A federal judge also would have the discretion to declare an individual a "covered journalist," who would be granted the privileges of the law.

(Reuters) - British broadcaster David Frost, a master of the television interview, famed for coaxing an apology for Watergate from Richard Nixon, has died suddenly, his family said on Sunday. Aged 74, he had a heart attack late on Saturday aboard a luxury cruise liner where he had a speaking engagement. His sudden death brought tributes from international celebrities and political leaders, many of whom called him a good friend as well as an acute interrogator. "David Frost died of a heart attack last night aboard the Queen Elizabeth, where he was giving a speech," his family said in a...

NEW YORK – Before his death in a fiery car crash, Michael Hastings was preparing to publish a major investigative piece tied to the undercover agent who is suspected of sanitizing President Obama’s passport records prior to the 2008 presidential election. The mystery has only deepened since the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office ruled that drugs in his system at the time of the June 18 crash, including amphetamines and marijuana, likely did not contribute to the crash. Hastings, 33 years old at the time of his death, wrote for Gentleman’s Quarterly, Rolling Stone and Buzzfeed, reporting on national security issues....

Award-winning journalist Michael Hastings told his neighbor that he was afraid to drive his Mercedes because he believed it had been tampered with, according to a LA Weekly report.

A former journalist at the Daily Mirror tabloid and a veteran editorial director at Rupert Murdoch's Sun newspaper are to be charged with making illegal payments to public officials, British prosecutors said on Tuesday.

A defendant in the ongoing murder trial of Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot and wounded in the center of Moscow on Wednesday evening, his lawyer said. Dzhabrail Makhmudov, who is currently on trial accused of involvement in the 2006 shooting death of Politkovskaya, was taken to a hospital and operated on, his lawyer Murad Musayev wrote on Facebook on Thursday. “The bullet hit Dzhabrail Makhmudov in the left thigh and passed through [his leg] just millimeters from his femoral artery. The doctors say Dzhabrail was ‘unbelievably lucky:’ Just a fraction of a difference in the bullet’s trajectory could...

WASHINGTON (AP) — John Palmer, a veteran reporter for NBC News who covered wars and Washington over a career that spanned 40 years, died Saturday after a brief illness at a Washington hospital.

President Obama on Saturday said he and first lady Michelle Obama were saddened by the death of longtime White House journalist Helen Thomas, calling her a “true pioneer” who opened doors and broke down barriers for generations of women. Thomas died on Saturday after a long illness. She was 92. Thomas covered every president from John F. Kennedy to Obama and long held the informal title of "Dean of the White House Press Corps." In a statement, Obama said Thomas “never failed to keep presidents – myself included – on their toes. What made Helen the ‘Dean of the White...

Who’s a Journalist? A Question With Many Facets and One Sure Answer Behind almost every correction in The Times, there is a story. In the case of the correction about Alexa O’Brien, the story is a particularly interesting one. The correction, which was in Wednesday’s paper, read: An article on Tuesday about the role of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in the case of Edward J. Snowden, the former computer contractor who leaked details of National Security Agency surveillance, referred incompletely to Alexa O’Brien, who has closely followed the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of providing military and...

Helen Thomas, a longtime White House journalist whose career covering ten presidents once earned the nickname the “Dean of the White House Press Corps,” died Saturday at 92, the Associated Press confirmed.

Helen Thomas, whose career covering the White House dated back to the Kennedy administration, died on Saturday at the age of 92, the Gridiron Club announced in an email to members on Saturday. Thomas was the the first woman to join the White House Correspondents' Association, and the first woman to serve as its president. She was also the first female member of the Gridiron Club, Washington's historic press group. Present at the press briefings of ten consecutive presidential administrations, Thomas's career in journalism ended in 2010 after controversial remarks she made about Israeli Jews were caught on camera. "Former...

LEIMERT PARK (CBSLA.com) — A CBS2/KCAL9 photographer and reporter were assaulted Monday night while covering a George Zimmerman protest in Crenshaw. Reporter Dave Bryan was conducting an interview around 10 p.m. when the suspect tackled him and his photographer, the station confirmed. “All of the sudden, this guy came up from behind, he had a hood, and he knocked David on the head and he pushed the camera guy down. The camera guy went down, the camera went down, David went down,” witness Joseph Deguerre, said. “I was in shock.” The suspect then fled the scene and the crew was...

Can you hear it? The stampede of Hollywood actors scrambling to condemn Alec Baldwin? The cacophony of icy tweets and acidic statements snarled by publicists like demented pantomime horses? That din of Tinseltown turning inwards when, in a rare fit of righteousness, of actually believing in something real and heartfelt and important, it stands up, en masse, to one of its own?

The archive of Journolist has been released to Gawker by the hacker Guccifer, and it presents a terrible dilemma for anyone connected to the Washington reporter scene from 2007ish to 2009, when it was revealed that some people made fun of Sarah Palin on the secret reporter listserv. As Gawker's Hamilton Nolan explains, it forced some reporters to publicly apologize, stirred up conservative outrage, and Dave Weigel left The Washington Post in the aftermath, only to be hired by Slate. The listserv caused problems for a few people who were on it. But now that the whole thing is public,...

Los Angeles police said they have yet to determine the cause of a fiery solo-car crash in Hollywood that apparently killed award-winning journalist Michael Hastings. The death of the 33-year-old Hastings was announced by his employer, BuzzFeed, which said he died in a Los Angeles car accident. But the Los Angeles County coroner's office had yet to determine Wednesday whether a body recovered from a fiery car crash was that of Hastings. The body was “unrecognizable” and badly charred, police told the Los Angeles Times. The body is identified only as "John Doe 117.”

Journalist Michael Hastings died in car accident in Los Angeles today. Details of the accident have not been released. He was 33. Best known for his 2010 profile of General Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone—it effectively ended the military career of the man who had led the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan—Hastings won the 2010 Polk award for magazine reporting and wrote a book about his experience reporting on the war, The Operators: The wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan. A second book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad, details Hastings’ time as a war correspondent...

President Obama appointed Susan Rice as Chief National Security Adviser on Wednesday, attracting renewed scrutiny to the administration’s handling of the attack on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya that resulted in the death of ambassador Chris Stevens and three others. Fox News’ Senior White House correspondent Ed Henry brought up the scandal and General Petraeus’ conclusions that the assessments of the Intelligence Committee on the issue changed so much and were no longer worth anything. Press Sectary Jay Carney tried to slap down the comment. “In every iteration of this, Ambassador Rice made clear as I did that, these...

“Are you kidding me?” I was always stunned to hear reporters ask me — as they did half a dozen times when I worked at the Pentagon — to show them some classified document or other. They’d just pop the question blithely, unfazed, without an apparent thought for the implications. My incredulous retort would usually reap an only half-sheepish answer: “Well, I had to ask.” Countless national security officials have had some version of this conversation – including the State Department security adviser that Fox News correspondent James Rosen allegedly plumbed for information on North Korea. Rosen wrote in an...