Hats Off to Unofficial Journalism!

The Drudge cast shows we're all journalists now.

Adam Clayton Powell III from the February 1998 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

In the age of the Internet, we are all publishers. Everyone can publish stories good and bad, true or false, over the free worldwide distribution medium of the Internet. You don't need to wear a fedora. You don't even need to go to journalism school.

So how do the courts know who enjoys the constitutional protections of press freedom? The easy, cynical answer used to be that freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. But now we all own one, or we can walk down to the public library, or Kinko's, and use one for free or for a nominal charge.

So if freedom of the press is for those who own one, freedom of the press now protects us all. Of course it always did, but some journalists claimed the First Amendment belonged just to them, not the public, so it is useful for the Internet to have rendered moot that narrow interpretation of the Constitution.

All of which leads to what may be an even more interesting issue: How do governments all over the world know who is licensed to practice journalism?

But wait, you may say, in most countries, and certainly in the United States, journalists are not licensed by the government.

Yes, they are.

If you live in New York City and want to cover that traditional first assignment of cub reporters, the police beat, you will be required to obtain a license from the government.

They call it a press credential.

It is a small shield, renewable annually, and if you don't get it, then you don't get it--the story, that is. There may be 8 million stories in the naked city, but without the government journalism license, you will not be permitted anywhere near the big ones.

For the truly well connected, New York issues special license plates with the letters NYP. This lets you drive your car right up to the scene of a crime, or an election, or Times Square on New Year's Eve. And the city sets aside special NYP zones where only cars with those special government press licenses can park. In New York, where a garage space can rent for more than a small house in some other cities, this is not just a convenience. A favorite game around town is spotting a new NYP zone and guessing who lives nearby.

Surely this is innocuous, some say. The government would not favor one newspaper over another, or one radio station over another.

Guess again.

The New York Times and CBS News could get credentials by the drawer-full for their reporters. But for years the "alternative" newspapers in New York City were denied city licenses--er, credentials. And journalists not employed by one of the big news organizations were almost always out of luck.

So one solution was to let the journalists themselves grant the licenses.
And just as with the other self-rating, self-regulating, self-censorship media schemes of the 1990s, the government could say it was not an official government act. The journalists made me do it.

The result is predictable to students of economics: Journalists themselves limit other journalists' access to news stories. Sometimes it has not been pretty.