Why Broadcast Journalism is Unnecessary and Illegitimate

The framers of our Constitution gave carte blance protection to “speech” and “the press”. They did not grant that anyone was then in possession of complete and unalloyed truth, and it was impossible that they should be able to a priori institutionalize the truth of a future such human paragon even if she/he/it were to arrive.

At the time of the framing, the 1830s advent of mass marketing was in the distant future. Since that era, journalism has positioned itself as the embodiment of nonpartisan truth-telling, and used its enormous propaganda power to make the burden of proof of any “bias” essentially infinite. If somehow you nail them dead to rights in consistent tendentiousness, they will merely shrug and change the subject. And the press is protected by the First Amendment. That is where conservatives have always been stuck.

And make no mistake, conservatives are right to think that journalism is their opponent. Examples abound so that any conservative must scratch his/her head and ask “Why?” Why do those whose job it is to tell the truth tell it so tendentiously, and even lie? The answer is bound and gagged, and lying on your doorstep in plain sight. The money in the business of journalism is in entertainment, not truth. It is that imperative to entertain which produces the perspective of journalism.

And that journalism does indeed have a perspective is demonstrated every day in what it considers a good news story, and what is no news story at all. Part of that perspective is that news must be new--fresh today--as if the events of every new day were of equal importance with the events of all other days. So journalism is superficial. Journalism is negative as well, because the bad news is best suited to keep the audience from daring to ignore the news. Those two characteristics predominate in the perspective of journalism.

But how is that related to political bias? Since superficiality and negativity are anthema to conservatives there is inherent conflict between journalism and conservatism.. By contrast, and whatever pious intentions the journalist might have, political liberalism simply aligns itself with whatever journalism deems a “good story.” Journalists would have to work to create differences between journalism and liberalism, and simply lack any motive to do so. Indeed, the echo chamber of political “liberalism” aids the journalist--and since liberalism consistently exacerbates the issues it addresses, successful liberal politicians make plenty of bad news to report.

The First Amendment which protects the expression of opinion must also be understood to protect claims by people of infallibility--and to forbid claims of infallibility to be made by the government. What, after all, is the point of elections if the government is infallible? Clearly the free criticism of the government is at the heart of freedom of speech and press. Freedom, that is, of communication.

By formatting the bands and standardizing the bandwiths the government actually created broadcasting as we know it. The FCC regulates broadcasting--licensing a handful of priveledged people to broadcast at different frequency bands in particular locations. That is something not contemplated in the First Amendment, and which should never pass constitutional muster if applied to the literal press. Not only so, but the FCC requires application for renewal on the basis that a licensee broadcaster is “operating in the public interest as a public trustee.” That is a breathtaking departure from the First Amendment.

No one questions the political power of broadcasting; the broadcasters themselves obviously sell that viewpoint when they are taking money for political advertising. What does it mean, therefore, when the government (FCC) creates a political venue which transcends the literal press? And what does it mean when the government excludes you and me--and almost everyone else--from that venue in favor of a few priviledged licensees? And what does it mean when the government maintains the right to pull the license of anyone it does allow to participate in that venue? It means a government far outside its First Amendment limits. When it comes to broadcasting and the FCC, clearly the First Amendment has nothing to do with the case.

The problem of journalism’s control of the venue of argument would be ameliorated if we could get them into court. In front of SCOTUS they would not be permitted to use their mighty megaphones. And to get to court all it takes is the filing of a civil suit. A lawsuit must be filed against broadcast journalism, naming not only the broadcast licensees, but the FCC.

We saw the tendency of broadcast journalism in the past election, when the delay in calling any given State for Bush was out of all proportion to the delay in calling a state for Gore, the margin of victory being similar--and, most notoriously, the state of Florida was wrongly called for Gore in time to suppress legal voting in the Central Time Zone portion of the state, to the detriment of Bush and very nearly turning the election. That was electioneering over the regulated airwaves on election day, quite on a par with the impact that illegal electioneering inside a polling place would have. It was an enormous tort.

And it is on that basis that someone should sue the socks off the FCC and all of broadcast journalism.

Journalism has a simbiotic relation with liberal Democrat politicians, journalists and liberal politicians are interchangable parts. Print journalism is only part of the press (which also includes books and magazines and, it should be argued, the internet), and broadcast journalism is no part of the press at all. Liberals never take issue with the perspective of journalism, so liberal politicians and journalists are interchangable parts. The FCC compromises my ability to compete in the marketplace of ideas by giving preferential access addresses to broadcasters, thus advantaging its licensees over me. And broadcast journalism, with the imprimatur of the government, casts a long shadow over elections. Its role in our political life is illegitimate.

The First Amendment, far from guaranteeing that journalism will be the truth, protects your right to speak and print your fallible opinion. Appeal to the First Amendment is appeal to the right to be, by the government or anyone else’s lights, wrong. A claim of objectivity has nothing to do with the case; we all think our own opinions are right.

When the Constitution was written communication from one end of the country to the othe could take weeks. Our republic is designed to work admirably if most of the electorate is not up to date on every cause celebre. Leave aside traffic and weather, and broadcast journalism essentially never tells you anything that you need to know on a real-time basis.

Journalists become journalists because they want the power (they don't call it such, but . . . ) to "comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable." IOW, they want the appearance of virtue - and, through that, they want power. Journalism is politics. And journalism is especially political when it claims that journalism is NOT politics - when it claims the virtue of objectivity wisdom. I am a journalist and have been since 1985, not because I wanted power, but because I love to write. I discovered, however, that while my fiction may not earn anything more than the occasional "payment in kind" I can make money as a writer. To me it was the best of all worlds: I actually get paid to do what I like to do. I currently edit and publish a monthly business journal of which I am principal owner.

I do have power, but not in the fashion you describe. I realized that while working as the entertainment editor of a daily newspaper, I received hundreds of complaints when the world series was stopped because of an earthquake (my TV listings said the game should be on the air), or when "Leave it to Beaver" was preempted because of Operation Desert Storm. I also came to realize that most people take what they read in newspapers and books as carved in stone. That meant I had the responsibility to ensure that what put out was as accurate and fair as I could make it.

People count words. They measure pictures and compare square inches. They note what you put on the first page and on Page three or four. They attack when a misspelled appears in 36 point type across the top of the page.

The broadcast people have it much harder because they are often trying to do all this in real-time, often presenting the stories on the spot. When they misprodounce a word, or stumble over a phrase or clause, people see it immediately.

I have read quite a bit recently on FreeRepublic and other sites on why the bloggers or forums such as these are making broadcast news and newspapers irrelevant. What I, in fact, see are gross generalizations, continually perpetuated by journalism and the media's version of the Monday morning quarterback. Having written that, let me say that yes, what Dan Rather did was wrong, and he should be fired. He certainly would not still be working for me after that.

You see, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokow, and that ilk are not broadcast journalism any more than all '60s music was the Beatles. Broadcast journalism is the lone sports reporter for the local TV station who showed up at the middle school girls basketball game Tuesday night to capture on film forever an eighth-grade standout scoring her 1,000th point or her middle school career. He then shared that with the world...or should I say, our world, those of use living within 100 miles of that station who saw the broadcast. My 14-year-old son, who had witnessed the event said, "that's neat, she got on TV."

Local broadcasters are not the problem. Most of them work hard at covering their world as best they can. Only once in a great while do I see a broadcast reporter mugging for the camera, trying to stretch a simple traffic accident into a job in a bigger market. Those individuals usually find themselves in different markets, but not bigger ones.

And if Broadcast journalism is so irrelevent, then why are so many threads on this site and others geared specifically toward discussions of live TV events?

I currently edit and publish a monthly business journal of which I am principal owner.

You can consider my writing to be "friendly fire." I make a distinction, first of all, between daily journalism and monthly reporting. Even with the monthly deadline, you will be under pressure to get your report finished - get it right, but get it finished - before the next deadline. That deadline starts to loom, in your perception, probably a week after you put the previous issue to bed. What must it be like, then, to face a new deadline not a month after you just met one, but a scant day?
You think you have deadline pressure, and you do - but it is nothing like what the daily journalist faces. And the broadcast journalist's deadline comes every hour, with provision for "breaking news" even faster than that. Nobody held a gun to their heads and said, "You have to write copy to a five minute deadline," but some people do it. It seems to me that any person with an ounce of conservatism in their perspective would rebel at the thought of slinging out stuff that fast, and claiming that they were broadcasting "in the public interest."
You have experience in daily journalism, so you know that what I'm saying has some truth in it. The stories that are put out on a daily paper are usually forgetable because of the need to fill the space, on deadline. When the daily journalist takes the most interesting story of the day, because it is new that day rather than because it was enduringly significant over a longer period of time, s/he is making a compromise that s/he would not do if writing a book. And the accuracy and completeness of the story cannot be as thorough as would be the case in even the most topical of books.
Well enough, if the daily journalist properly disclaims the fact that the story is written to deadline and is incomplete and possibly inaccurate - but how often does that happen? Generally the journalist is boasting of his/her objectivity and saying - as Dan Rather actually did (IIRC) in the early evening of election day 2000 - that you can take his word to the bank.

But the point, surely, is that in an organization which actually seeks the truth Mary Mapes wouldn't have been on a five-year jihad to try to prove something counter to all the evidence she had at the start. The fundamental premise of the TANG stories was that there was a waiting list for entry into the program for which Bush signed up, and that political influence enabled him to jump the line. But in fact when Mapes pitched the story to management five years ago she already had paper in her file indicating that in fact recruiting enough people physically and mentally qualified for, and willing to volunteer for, fighter pilot training and service required effort on the part of TANG.
You serve the industy you cover, and the insiders of that industry would sniff out favoritism among its members rather quickly - and your audience would cancel out on you. You have an incentive to get it right, and you don't have peers who are willing to cover for you if you will cover for them. The problem we-the-people face is that Big Journalism has learned to go along and get along in exactly that way; the big journalism outlets (Fox News Channel excepted, at least partly) simply will not attack a member of their herd as they would Fox News Channel, or Ford, or your local water company if they had sold bad product, and stonewalled in the aftermath of it.

if Broadcast journalism is so irrelevent, then why are so many threads on this site and others geared specifically toward discussions of live TV events?

There is a difference between what interests the public, and what is in the public interest. Unless it is a traffic or weather report, breaking news rarely is actionable information. 911 was an exception, but the rule is otherwise pretty hard and fast. So the public may be interested in the outcome of the election, but it is not in the public interest that an uncertain outcome be broadcast in the name of the government - as is ultimately the case of FCC-licensed broadcasting.

I spent five years as the arts & entertainment editor of a daily paper, where we covered symphony performances, theater performances, arts shows, etc., on a deadline basis. I would see a show that began at 8 p.m. and ended at 10:30 p.m., and I had to have my story, not only done, but written to length, without errors by 11:15 p.m. I never missed a deadline.

Before that, I was a general assignment reporter, and one of the first things I covered was the death of an eight-year-old boy, who stepped out between two school buses and was killed when a third bus hit him. This meant asking a lot of tough questions of some very shaken people (curiously enough, two of my daughters attended the same school several years later).

Do I think people wanted to know what happened? Yes, especially the parents of the students at that school, who wanted to know not only what happened, but could it happen to my kids.

Broadcasting live does have its benefits. I believe the entire Amber Alert system benefits greatly from the fact that live broadcasts can get the word out instantly to millions of people and may save lives. I think that coverage of floods, fires, and other disasters are important. Would the Tsunami relief people have generated as much support without the images? No, because it would have remained just another third world disaster, nameless people dying somewhere most people never heard of. Broadcast coverage created sympathy for those people.

You are right, there is a difference between public interest and interesting the public. The decision to determine what is important and what is not takes place each night at story meetings across countless newsrooms. Good, bad or indifferent, editors, writers, reporters, and directors sit down and try to determine what to present and what to skip. The curious thing about this is no matter what network, station or paper, most media outlets will offer the same stories, even Fox. The overall content of the stories usually don't vary that much. And the reporters struggle to make their version unique enough to qualify as still being relevant. But the overall content of any nightly news is virtually the same.

All of this is about competition. Being the first to broadcast a story—or in my case, to be the first to print a story. Some times a station will begin its broadcast a minute or two early to try to be the first.

One of our local stations introduced a "Live at Five" program instead of Oprah, Dr. Phil or Wheel of Fortune. This transitioned into its 6 p.m. broadcast. It also caused another local station to broadcast a "First at Five" program, beginning at 4:58 p.m. each night. It's only five minutes long, but it kept a lot of people from switching channels.

Journalists are caught in a deep rut here, without any hope of getting out. Most of the FReeper would point to Fox news a model of what broadcast journalism should be. If we accept that as a valid argument, then if other networks tried to do the same thing, people would still attack those same news shows, even here. I've noticed that when a politician votes the way most conservatives want, That politician still catches flack from the same people. you read, "It's about time," or "It doesn't make a difference," or even (and my personal favorite), "He's still going to Hell." If NBC, CBS, or ABC tried to model itself after FOX, most of the comments would read discuss how those other stations are simply trying to steal Fox's style, or how the others sold out to the "right-wing wackos." You would be hard pressed to find a single comments stating "NBC did well" or "Good Job CBS." What positive statements you'd find would still be crouched in contingency statements: "Gee, they finally got one right," or "About time." So where is the incentive to do things other than they way they currently do?

I would see a show that began at 8 p.m. and ended at 10:30 p.m., and I had to have my story, not only done, but written to length, without errors by 11:15 p.m. I never missed a deadline.

That is something I could never do. Just not in me to write as clearly as you do under time pressure. I can write reasonably well, IMHO - but only by dint of careful (time consuming) thought and copious edit/rewrite (which is far more practical on a computer than the old ink-on-paper method, even with the help of photocopying).
At the risk of sounding like I'm denigrating something I can't do, just because I can't do it, I do however raise a question: Did you ever have second thoughts about the perspective you had immediately after the performance? If you had written the review all over after a few days, would it have been the same piece, with no change other than your tendency to forget some detail in the interim? And if you had your druthers, with no constraints, would you have said that all the performances and shows were worth reviews of exactly the same prespecified length?
These questions represent a challenge to the format to which you were being paid to write. I make no doubt that the deadline and the length to which you were writing were important for commercial reasons. I am trying to address the philosophical point that, at any given time, something else might have been more important to the public interest than the story you were assigned to write.

Do I think people wanted to know what happened? Yes, especially the parents of the students at that school, who wanted to know not only what happened, but could it happen to my kids.

Do you think the deadline influenced the way you researched the story and how you wrote it? Did it compromise your ability to do justice to the shaken people involved, and did your story make the reader unnecesarily paranoid?

An Amber Alert system would have been better for those in the path of the tsunami than all the relief which can now be mustered. The problem lay in bureaucracy; the Australian government had warning of the earthquake's likely consequence in time for an Amber Alert to have saved a hundred thousand lives but diplomatic protocol and the sheer bad luck that it hit at a time when nobody was minding the store at the Indonesian emergency system prevented any substantive response.
Which raises the question of whether the Australian government was right in sticking to "channels" in such a crisis. It puts me in mind of the story of the G.I.s at Pearl Harbor who struggled to get to the armory and, when they got there and were under attack, were refused ammunition because they didn't have the necessary paperwork. The sergent was asked later if he would ever hand out ammunition without that paperwork. He replied, "Only in an emergency."

. . . which only says that everyone involved - journalist and audience - is behaving in a superficial way. The journalists all have the same story, and their business depends on being the first to tell it. That's serious business to the journalist, but to the public it almost never is - how does it really matter how soon I hear that someone I never met died?

I have read quite a bit recently on FreeRepublic and other sites on why the bloggers or forums such as these are making broadcast news and newspapers irrelevant.

The great weakness of postings on forums is that you don't know the writer; any given post could be a spoof. But that is also a strength of the internet; I shouldn't be so gulible as to think I'm entitled to only the truth. If I'm "entitled to the truth" I don't have to think for myself and should exclusively believe the truth that I am told. That is exactly what you as a journalists are trained to not do; if you are tempted to go to press with something on the internet you need to fact check first.
The internet is just a little boy pointing out that the emperor doesn't have any clothes on. The first reaction is, "you're only a little boy, what do you know about anything?" The second reaction is, "Wait a minute, he's only a little boy, he doesn't have a position to not be worthy of!" We can see with our own eyes that he must be right!
In the old (pre-Reagan) days, there wouldn't have been any effective public review of those CBS forgeries on any timely basis. The truth might have come out, after the election was over. Now, we have talk radio and the internet. The internet brings a diffuse popular intelligence to bear on things, and a Buckhead claims something is fishy. Others take a look, and in hours a large fraction of the truth has been sniffed out. But it's still just on the web, and not everyone even has a computer. That's where talk radio comes in, and after that Fox News Channel.
The Fairness Doctrine suppressed open on-air partisanship. If in fact there were no inherent political tendency in the news business, the end of the Fairness doctrine would have produced openly left and openly right political discussion in roughly equal measure, serving left and right niche audiences. But that is not what happened; "right wing talk radio" is all one word, and we see such phenomena as politically sponsored Air America in a lame attempt to find significant audience for which neither arrogant (excuse me, "objective") journalism nor PBS nor NPR is sufficiently leftist.
The truth is that "objective" journalism is an Establishment which polices its membership by condemning as "not objective" (meaning, "not wise") anyone who states out loud the obvious truth that journalism about politics - journalism about anything with political implications - is politics. It's absurd to take someone's word for it when they say that they are not selling anything. But that is exactly what Big Journalism says, backed by our government's claim that they have given CBS its broadcast licenses because they broadcast "in the public interest."

The liberals will always exist, and they will always get good press. For the simple reason that "liberalism," so-called, is the political expression of the conventions of journalism. Namely,

"If it bleeds, it leads,"
"There's nothing more worthless than yesterday's newspaper," and
"objectivity."
What that really means is,

talk about what went wrong (second guess),
be glib and superficial, and
claim superior wisdom.
Leftism is embedded in the tenents of commercial mass-market journalism, and "liberal" politics is simply the following of that natural political wind.
Big Journalism is basically cheap talk, and there is no talk cheaper than the second guess. Liberal politicians are following Big Journalism, and Big Journalism is not leading but operating as a herd of fearful second-guessers.
Liberals politicans (insert photo of x42 or John Kerry here) are glory seekers but, given power will engage in symbolic gestures and pretend they have solved the problems. They will not lead because that would mean taking responsibilty. Not that you would know it, if all you knew was what the journalists were saying about them . . .

Marching on the SCOTUS won't accomplish anything. They have lifetime tenure and couldn't care less what the people think of them.

The Senators on the other hand still have to answer to the people to some degree. They're the ones we really have to lean on. We need to let them know that if Bush's nominees don't get voted they'll get booted out of office just like Tom Daschle was. And I'm talking about both Democrats and fake Republicans like Arlen Specter and his ilk.

Ultimately we must have a Congress which will stand up on its hind legs and take responsibility. Congress can limit the jurisdiction of the court, and Congress can impeach inJustice Kennedy for imposing laws on us that the Congress didn't vote for and the president didn't sign.
Congress can impeach a judge as easily as it can impeach a president for going to court and lying to get a suit against his own person wrongly decided in his favor. The Senate may not convict, but perhaps we need to see how many judges are content to boast that they beat a rap with a majority in the House and Senate on record that they should not remain in office.
Finally, at least one branch of the government must stand up the the Democratic Establishment of reporters and the judges and politicians who toady up to journalism and in turn get political cover from journalists. I am one who believes that broadcast journalism is illegitimate because the government created broadcasting (as opposed to Marconi's mere "radio transmission") by allocating broadcasting "rights" to a few and censoring all the rest of us.
The First Amendment does not state that journalism, or any of its practitioners, is a public service. The First Amendment asserts that newspaper publishing - that book publishing or any genre of printing or speaking - is a right of the people, rather that a privilege which the government may lawfully superintend. And it adds that the people - not the owner of The New York Times alone but the people, without distinctions or classes or titles of nobility - have the right to express their political opinions and desires among themselves and to the government.
The fundamental fact of politics is that journalism is politics. The facts and logic simply will not sustain the contrary assumption that journalism is public service. If you assume that journalism is politics the fact that journalists do hit pieces on politicians and political parties which they do not favor is no stranger than water flowing downhill rather than up. If, counter to all reason, you assume that journalism is public service, 60 Minutes II launching utterly tendentious assault on the Republican Party and George W. Bush last October seems completely inexplicable. And you have no explanation, not only for the tendentiousness of CBS but for the fact that mainstream journalism would not tell the simple declarative truth that the "memos" upon which CBS relied were rather crude forgeries.
It is all very well for The New York Times, or for any other newspaper-publishing private enterprise which are under no obligation to eschew political tendentiousness to engage in politics under the protection of courts which recognize the applicability of the First Amendment to newspapers. But CBS and the other broadcasters are given license to practice politics in a way that government censorship of we-the-people denies you and me the privilege of doing.
That injustice is rationalized by the claim that the government-licensed broadcasters are performing public service with which your having an equal right to transmit would interfere. In fact of course, the broadcasters behave politically like the rest of journalism, as the 60 Minutes II fraud makes excruciatingly clear. And like the rest of journalism, the broadcasters compound the partisanship by loudly trumpeting their own superiority over the "partisanship" of people who modestly admit that they are not objective (and who do so, frankly, because unlike journalists they lack the propaganda power to withstand the ridicule they would incur if they did otherwise).
Everyone has had the experience of yelling back at the radio or TV, but almost no one presumes to do so with a radio transmitter. If the First Amendment applies to broadcasting by CBS it also applies to broadcasting by you or me. Under the Constitution you have, theoretically, the same rights as anyone else.
If you really believed that the First Amendment applies to broadcasting, why wouldn't you be broadcasting yourself?!
Is it time for a March on the SCOTUS and the Judiciary and the Senate?
Free Republic | March 2, 2005 | Jim Robinson

The ping appreciated. My trusty Lexmark has been put to use. A disturbing element of use of the public domain, is in Canada. Sometimes one sees television "jounalists" almost betray themselves, as if it were a huge nudge,nudge, wink.wink routine.This on reporting Liberal Party triumphs at the polls. That party controls the funding of many hundreds of jobs at CBC.

The Canadian public generally accept this, because of these cliches. "The most trusted name in broadcasting. The news you can trust etc." They actually trumpet their own "virtue".

To things American. When one considers that it went down to about 500 odd votes in Florida in 2000. I dare say some people could still wake up in a sweat, even yet.

I hold this to be true. That Dan Rather deliberately tried to sabotage the presidential chances of George Walker Bush. In his mind, the solemn fact of the Iraq war, could possibly swing the vote in favour of Senator Kerry.

His was a deep thrust - a final quietus. . That it was well parried,was only just. Only he knows though. If he is a political dupe, then he will lose no sleep. As a man and an American, he should come clean. He should campaign for a more objective journalism. If such a thing could exist.

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

As long as mainstream journalists share a similar view of the world, that world can never be reported “objectively”. And that is why the so-called alternative media have had such an impact. But don’t these bloggers also have a slanted view of the issues? Of course they do, but, in most cases, they acknowledge it and the consumers can factor in that slant when they read.

And why, pray tell, do "mainstream journalists share a similar view of the world?" I submit that it is nothing more than simple economics. Adam Smith could have told you that; it is nothing more than a manifestation of the routine conspiring of tradesmen against the public. The cardinal rule of whoso would be a "mainstream" journalist is, not to engage in flame wars with other mainstream journalists. That, after all, would be to commit the folly of voluntarily picking a fair fight.
So instead the "mainstream" journalist picks on anyone important who is not a mainstream journalist - and who is also not a toady who parrots the line that whatever "mainstream journalism" mentions is of first importance. Those who toady to "mainstream journalism" are rewarded with good PR, including - until they ran it into the ground - the label "liberal." Those who do not toady to journalism are considered fair game.
Pat Sajak: Slanted Journalism is Everywhere (Slams Media on Terri Shiavo Reporting!)
PatSajak.com ^ | 3/20/05 | Pat Sajak

The howls of indignation that the Bush administration paid money for favorable press treatment of certain issues have been wholly absent from most media outlets for this (Pew's) direct manipulation of coverage of an issue popular with journalists.

McCain-Feingold is the codification of the conceit that it is possible to draw a bright line between politics and other opinion. That is a fallacy.
The First Amendment codifies freedom of religion and the right to assemble and petition the government in the same breath as "freedom of speech, or of the press." In so doing, the First Amendment implies that the three - religious exercise, speech and press, and assembly and petition - are really all just one ball of wax.
The idea of regulating politics and claiming we still have freedom makes sense, unfortunately - to people who were weaned on government-licensed journalism, and lack the imagination to see that the principle of ~~public airwaves~~ government-controlled broadcasting of ~~journalism~~ politics is tyrannical.
PEW'S STENCH (financed sub-rosa pro-CFR campaign) NY POST ^ | March 29, 2005 | LETTER TO EDITOR

it has gotten so politically correct.

Put 50 people up in front of the world, selected for their looks and singing/dancing talent alone, and then put them on the spot on live TV and try to get them to sound intelligent. The only possible result is that they will tell the interviewer what s/he wants to hear.
And that is just as true of the interviewer himself as it is of the girls he's interviewing; he is a mere celebrity who, without any real intellectual credentials, is just trying to sound intelligent. So he is just faking it, too.
That process goes right up to the journalists - who are in general very little different than the intellectually compeletely uncredentialed showgirls themselves. But he can go along with the herd of other journalists similarly situated. As long as he stays with the herd, he knows he's safe. Safe from his worst fear, which is getting bad PR.
And where does the herd go? The herd is superficial because of short deadlines, just like the showgirl is on the spot with the TV camera pointed at her and the microphone in front of her mouth. And the herd is critical of those who actually have to make decisions and get things done - because "any fool can criticize, and most fools do." Any silly criticism or second-guess will do to inflate the ego of the shallow writer and the equally shallow reader/hearer of the criticism.
Eventually the facts will catch up with any particular shallow criticism - but of course, when that happens that only signifies that it is time for the journalists to change the subject. Ronald Reagan was mercilessly criticized as a "Right Wing Cold Warrior" and a reckless cowboy who would cause WW III - until suddenly "the Cold War is over." No discussion of who won and who lost until Reagan's funeral 15 years later - and then absolutely NO discussion of the fact that journalism and journalism's acolytes known as liberals were the vehement opponents of the man who actually did the right thing.
All that to say that the interview portion of the Miss America Pageant is just as unedifying as the swimsuit competition.
A Challenge for Miss America in Reality TV Era
The New York Times | April 9, 2005 | Iver Peterson

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