Hats Off to Unofficial Journalism!

The Drudge cast shows we're all journalists now.

Adam Clayton Powell III from the February 1998 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

On Capitol Hill, the licenses--er, credentials--are handed out by the journalists in the press galleries. Until the 1940s, women and minority reporters were barred from covering Congress not by government edict but by the press itself. It took pressure from newly elected minority congressmen to force the white male press galleries to issue licenses to people who did not look like Humphrey Bogart or even wear fedoras.

In more recent memory, Bloomberg Business News was refused credentials to cover most of Washington. Michael Bloomberg delivered his news on computers, not on newsprint or over the air, so he could not be a journalist, or so the argument went. Bloomberg's competitors were in effect keeping a new competitor out of the market.

As Bloomberg tells the story, he finally gave the material from his news service to The New York Times for free, so he could point to his articles in the newspaper. And then everyone said, oh, yes, you must be a journalist, and Bloomberg received his credentials.

Can Matt Drudge get a license to cover the news? Can he get that piece of paper that lets him interview a member of Congress, or a member of the New York City Police Department at a crime scene? Not likely.

So who is a journalist? Whoever the government says is a journalist.

Under certain scenarios, this could also mean the government would decide whether we can ever see the work of those not officially designated as journalists. Here is how it would work:

The Clinton administration has suggested that everyone on the Internet (at least in the United States) should submit to content ratings, all so America's children can be protected from unwanted words and images. To avoid First Amendment problems, journalists would be exempted from the proposed ratings systems. The ratings would be "voluntary," of course, as are the ratings that have been imposed on the television networks--ratings which also exempt journalists.

But who would receive the official "journalist" exemptions from the ratings system? Who is a journalist?

This is not an academic question but a commercial one. Much of the revenue that supports journalism online, as in print and broadcasting, comes from advertisers. The result of losing or not getting the journalism license would be smaller potential audiences, less advertiser interest, lower revenue, and therefore less chance of survival--or existence to begin with. Such a system would in effect be an electronic "prior restraint," a practice that has repeatedly been ruled illegal when the government has tried to use it against newspapers.

On television and online, the mainstream conglomerate news services would of course be classified as news. But on television, Hard Copy, Inside Edition, and other syndicated reality-based programs might not be classified as news. Oops: Inside Edition just won the prestigious George Polk Award for investigative reporting. Back to the drawing board. But Matt Drudge need not apply.

Consider an explicit abuse of the power to license journalists, this one from South Africa 10 years ago, when journalists who opposed apartheid, often grouped under the label "alternative press," were simply refused licenses to report the news. The system was described at a conference of African editors in November by those who'd had firsthand experience with the editors who issued press licenses in the 1980s.

"The alternative press could not get credentials from these `self-regulating' bodies," said Kanthan Pillay, now managing editor of the daily Cape Times of Cape Town. "The overall effect of these regulations on the press was a disaster." When he was challenged by some journalists at the conference, who said journalists should license themselves, just like doctors, Pillay's response drew applause: "The right to express yourself is not part of being a journalist. It is part of being a human being."

You don't even need to wear a fedora.