Replies

It's my job to tell the story of my subject, not my personal story, which to me, may be the closest thing there is to a true definition for objectivity.
I know my competitors don't always do this, but I do. It may be why my circulation has increased why others have fallen. I don't know.
The bottom line is, I am a journalist for no other reason than I make my living as a journalist. That's what ultimately defines me as a journalist.
Much in the same way, Mel Gibson is an actor and director because that is how he makes his money. Randy Johnson is a baseball player because that is how he makes his money. Peyton Manning is a football player because that's how he makes his money. I act from time to time in Community Theater. I play baseball and football with my children. These actions do not make me an actor, baseball or football player, anymore than someone running a blog site is a journalist.

Most bloggers that I know of are people simply doing this for personal reasons, almost always injecting far more bias into their publications or writings than Dan Rather at his worst. Granted, that is their privilege. I do my best to remain as neutral as I possibly can because I want to write that next story, the one that's out there that I haven't seen or heard yet. I know that if I push anything in any political direction, I won't get that story the next time. I need that next story because landing it helps put food on my table, and clothes on the backs of my children.

Here is to me the crux of the issue raised by this thread. Your position is that you are a journalist in pretty much the way that my auto mechanic is an auto mechanic or my doctor is a doctor (which is a very American perspective on identity, BTW - we think that all honest work is honorable, and we are identified by it. We didn't get that from Britain with its class structure and its titles of nobility, we got it in the process of clearing the virgin timber to make farmland. In that context your daddy's family tree was less significant than that you earned caluses on your hands). To the extent that a doctor is a doctor and a mechanic is a mechanic, you are a journalist.
But the Constitution doesn't say that I can be a doctor or a mechanic, and it does say that I can talk to whoever will listen and I can print to whoever will read. Why the difference? I can be a doctor if the government allows me to hang out a shingle (not that I could or would) and I can be a mechanic if the government allows me to do safety inspections - but if I decide to print something and try to sell it or give it away the Constitution says that I can do so. That is because the framers of the Constitution wanted to prevent the government from establishing political truth, political correctness.
If you want to establish yourself as a notary public you can take a course and take an oath that whatever you place your seal on reflects facts known to you that is one thing. But if you want to be a journalist with First Amendment protection from the government, that is inconsistent with status as an official truth-teller.
You did not acquire your First Amendment rights when you bought your printing press. To the contrary you bought your printing press using your First Amendment rights and money which was not necessarily all made in publishing. I emphasize that last point, because advocates of McCain-Feingold have a fettish that money made selling newspapers - or selling advertisements in newspapers - is somehow "clean" in comparison to the money I make otherwise. If my money were to buy an advertisement from you, asking the public to vote for Joe Schmoe as County Dog Catcher, my money is subject to regulation which would be completely unconstitutional if you just decided to spend your own ink and paper on promoting the same thing.
The topic of this thread is the idea that the government should decide who "is a journalist" for purposes of a shield law. That idea is of a piece with the idea that your money as a printer of journalism is cleaner than my money as a person with constitutional rights no different than your own - except that I haven't bought a printing press yet. And so long as the government gives priviledges to ~~journalists~~ people simply for doing what the Constitution specifically says I have a right to do, I propose to insist on the yet until my dying day.
Who Is a Journalist?
Slate ^ | March 9, 2005 | Jacob Weisberg