In 2010, BLM denied Horseback Magazine photojournalist Laura Leigh access to federal land to photograph a roundup. She went to court, was rejected, then went to a complex chain of appeals. Now the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and other j-groups have filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of photojournalists' First Amendment rights to cover government actions.
The Senate Judiciary Committee on September 12, 2013, approved a bill shielding journalists from being compelled to reveal their confidential sources. Its prospects for enactment look iffy in a Congress noted for gridlock. The panel approved the bill (S 987, titled "The Free Flow of Information Act of 2013) by a 13-5 vote.
News broken this month by Politico revealed the existence of a Koch brothers fund that quietly handed out some $250 million to conservative causes during the 2012 elections. Under U.S. law, such groups are tax-exempt, can raise unlimited amounts of money, and do not have to disclose their donors.
In 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) required publicly traded companies to disclose to their stockholders (and the public) what business risks they might face from climate change. Almost three-quarters of the companies are still ignoring the rule, and their shareholders are flying blind.
Incoming EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy may have signaled an opening in the agency's long-troubled relations with the news media during her September 20, 2013, announcement of EPA's carbon rule at the National Press Club.
Under law, Pennsylvania was supposed to publish a report outlining climate change impacts on the state by Spring 2012. But the Department of Environmental Protection says it is still being reviewed, and nobody will say when it might be published.
The groups said that EPA's proposed rule was needed to control pollution, under the Clean Water Act, from more than 20,000 concentrated animal feeding operations across the country. EPA initially published the rule in October 2011, but then withdrew it July 20, 2012.
A hearing September 10, 2013, before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform featured former EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson and other Obama administration officials in a theatrical stare-down with House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA, pictured) that garnered buckets of news media coverage.
SEJ complained in an August 7 letter to CHP that the arrest of Willits News photog Steven Eberhard for attempting to document a protest was a violation of constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the press. CHP responded August 28, noting that its policies for news media access to the Willits highway bypass construction site had changed. However, several assertions in the letter are not true, according to Eberhard and a video of the incident. © Photo by Steve Eberhard: CHP arrests demonstrators Sept. 10, 2013, at the Willits, Calif., bypass construction site.
Try this free, open-source add-on to Mozilla's Firefox web browser for "web-scraping" — meaning a methodical effort to capture data disclosed on the web and put it into useable form, typically a database.
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