Fla. bill would force political bloggers to register with the state
Journalists and First Amendment experts on Friday slammed a bill from state Sen. Jason Brodeur that would require bloggers of all backgrounds to register with the state government if they write about certain Florida elected officials.
SB 1316, filed by the Republican from Sanford this week for consideration in the session that begins Tuesday, would create a written record of whether a blogger is being paid to write a post online and who is paying them.
The bill specifically excludes those who write for “the website of a newspaper or other similar publication,” but has no stated exemption for onlineonly outlets or television stations and networks.
Bobby Block, executive director of the Florida First Amendment Foundation, said the measure goes beyond anything he’s seen in the United States.
“From my own experience, the only places where journalists would ever have to register with the government have been apartheid South Africa, the countries behind the Iron Curtain, the USSR, Zaire, Burkina Faso, and socialist Ethiopia,” Block said. “... I don’t think Florida being in that company of those countries is a good thing.”
The bill says a blogger must register either the Office of Legislative Services or the Commission on Ethics within five days after posting a story mentioning the governor, another member of the Florida Cabinet or a state legislator.
Bloggers would be required to file monthly reports every time another state elected official is mentioned, under penalty of a $25 per day fine up to $2,500 if they fail to do so.
The bill compares the registration process for paid bloggers to the one already in place for lobbyists. Any fines incurred would be paid into the Legislative Lobbyist Registration Trust Fund or Executive Branch Lobby Registration Trust Fund.
The bill is the second from Brodeur this week that would put extra restrictions on the media.
His other one, SB
1220, proposes sweeping changes to Florida’s libel and defamation law, making it easier to sue journalists by automatically presuming information from anonymous sources to be false and preventing journalists from shielding the identity of sources.
The measures come as Gov. Desantis has made “legacy media” a target for the session in Tallahassee, where the GOP has supermajorities in both chambers. The governor has repeatedly clashed with reporters during his tenure, and SB 1316 would presumably make it more difficult to criticize him and other elected officials.
Brodeur has been under intense media scrutiny because of a “ghost” candidate in the 2020 state Senate election in which he defeated Democrat Patricia Sigman. Brodeur has denied any involvement in the scheme.
Brodeur did not return requests for comment Friday.
In response, Sarah Rumpf, an Orlando journalist with the New York-based website Mediaite, posted a picture of the U.S. Constitution on Twitter, with the caption, “Here’s my documentation needed to write about Desantis, [Attorney General Ashley] Moody, Brodeur, or any elected official.”