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In blogs we trust

With bloggers publishing in ever-increasing numbers on the Internet, it is time to reconsider the country’s patchwork of outdated shield laws, writes Law Professor Mary-Rose Papandrea in “Citizen Journalism and the Reporter’s Privilege,” a research paper published by the Minnesota Law Review in February.

Though no law protects mainstream reporters from being subpoenaed into federal courts, case law or statutes serve as shields in the courts of 46 states. Few laws, however, protect those whom Papendrea calls the Internet’s “citizen journalists.” She notes that freedom of the press, as conceived by the Constitution’s framers, “referred quite literally to freedom to publish using a printing press.” And yet, the partisan pamphlets and newspapers published by 18th- and early 19th-century presses closely resemble, in tone and purpose, the typical 21st-century blog.

Papandrea points out that bloggers have scooped professionals on stories ranging from President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky (first publicized in the Drudge Report in 1998) to the 2006 scandal involving Congressman Mark Foley and Capitol pages. Though few blogs undergo the same editorial and fact-checking processes as a mainstream publication, she writes, bloggers who commit a factual error hear about it quickly from their readers.

By encouraging sources to talk to reporters, anonymously if necessary, shield laws promote an informed public; some state laws also shield scholars, book authors, and political pollsters. Papandrea argues for expansive laws that shield anyone, professional or amateur, “who disseminates information to the public” from being forced to identify sources. “Protecting the identity of the small minority who leak information that does not serve the public interest,” she writes, “is a minor price to pay to encourage . . . whistleblowers to come forward.”

Integrazione, inshala

In 2005, the creation of a quasi-governmental council made up of 16 prominent Muslims allowed the Italian government to raise up and give influence to the Muslim population’s moderates and to marginalize further “the extremist minority.” So writes Jonathan Laurence, an assistant professor of political science, in “Knocking on Europe’s Door: Islam in Italy,” published in the Brookings Institution’s U.S.–Europe Analysis Series in February 2006.

Italy has come late to issues of Muslim integration, observes Laurence. The country has “never [been] a colonial power of great significance,” he writes, and so has attracted Muslim immigrants haphazardly, many as illegals—“a far cry from the planned recruitment and bilateral association agreements of the 1950s and 1960s in Germany and France.” Unlike France’s Muslims (mostly North African), or Germany’s (largely Turkish), Muslims in Italy are a highly diverse population, a quarter Albanian, a quarter Moroccan, as well as Egyptian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and others, representing some 30 countries in all.

Because few of Italy’s one million Muslims hold citizenship (under 2 percent in 2000), the Islamic religion does not qualify for an intesa, the arrangement with the state enjoyed by Jewish and Christian denominations that facilitates chaplaincies, marriages, and funerals and provides for a voluntary check-off of financial support on tax forms. The Islamic Consultative Council formed in 2005 is mostly lay and purely advisory, but it addresses such practical religious concerns. With its members chosen by the country’s minister of interior, the council provides “a place for Islam amongst the recognized religions in Italian state-church relations,” says Laurence, but the criterion for membership is more likely to be a demonstrated faith in democracy than demonstrated adherence to the tenets of Islam.

A loss of words

Elementary educators have long known that children who speak a language other than English at home have more than their share of trouble learning reading and other subjects at school. One proposed solution—that teachers take advantage of the oral and preliteracy skills gained in the home and teach children to transfer those skills to English—has been tarnished in a study coauthored by Mariela Páez, an assistant professor of education, and researchers at Harvard and the University of South Florida. The report appears in the March-April Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.

The study followed 319 four-year-olds from low-income households in Massachusetts and Maryland through a year of preschool, testing them for oral and preliteracy skills in both English, the language of their preschool classroom, and Spanish, the children’s home language, early in the school year and again at the end. In measurements of vocabulary, letter and word recognition, and “memory for sentences,” the children performed far below the norm in both languages—although slightly and unexpectedly better in English than in Spanish. In Spanish vocabulary, the children lost ground during the year, a likely sign, Páez and her coauthors write, of “the vulnerability of young bilingual children to language loss in the context of acquiring a societal language as their second language.”

The data raises doubts about building on Spanish or any other home language skill to teach young children reading in English. Instead, the authors call for “powerful interventions”—in English, at the preschool level—to promote both oral and preliteracy skills in low-income, bilingual students.

David Reich is a writer based in the Boston area

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