WHEN I FIRST ran across a story online stating that a Michigan state senator had proposed the establishment of a state "licensing board for journalists" which would determine who is and who is not qualified to practice journalism, I confess that I bristled.

Not that I felt my own credentials were being challenged. I'm a career journalist, college trained, with more than four decades of experience. I've worked for dailies, weeklies and monthlies and published my own newsletters in print and online. But freedom of the press is a fundamental Constitutional right. My license to practice journalism is the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, and the very notion of government arrogating the power to decide who can and can't exercise that right really rankles me.

A poignant one-liner popped into my head, and I had in mind using it in a terse rejoinder to post in the "Rand's Rants" section of PerspicacityPress.com.

Just one problem. I've got this nasty habit of fact-checking.

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It turned out (as is so often the case) that the story was largely erroneous. Sen. Bruce Patterson, a Republican, had actually not proposed licensing journalists but had submitted a bill to establish, in his own words, "a central repository for information voluntarily submitted by reporters and would allow those meeting the criteria in the bill to be recognized as registered reporters" for print, broadcast or internet media. An important distinction, to be sure.

Still, no government body or government agency has any business setting such criteria, and creating a new bureaucracy so empowered is emphatically un-American. I would remind Sen. Patterson that it is also un-Republican. Sorta like McCain's sponsorship of a bill restricting my right to express my political views. And yes, I take that personal!

Furthermore, experience has shown us that government bureaucracies almost inevitably undergo "mission creep," and what starts as voluntary rarely stays that way for long.

In the bill (Michigan Senate Bill 1323, 2010), Patterson enumerates the qualifications he believes a news reporter should meet in order to merit the state's endowment of the title, "Michigan Registered Reporter." Among them are "good moral character" (but by whose definition?), a degree in journalism or equivalent (which, for graduates from most of the nation's J-schools, may indicate little more than four years of pro-socialist, anti-American indoctrination), and, oh yes (beginning two years from the bill's effective date), a letter of recommendation from someone who has already been admitted to the elite brotherhood of Registered Reporters.

It's already tough enough for journalists and aspiring journalists who happen not to have radical leftist leanings to break into the field of journalism in traditional print and broadcast media, much less to get ahead. Has it not occurred to Sen. Patterson that requiring applicants to secure insider endorsement would throw one more obstacle in their path? No, I guess it has not, but it ought to have occurred to him.

Patterson's concern may be that there are a lot of irresponsible, untrained, uninformed, unprincipled bloggers in the New Media who put out a lot of bad information with nobody to hold them to account, and he's right. But many professional news writers in what he would a month ago have characterized as the "legitimate" media were, ironically, among those who failed to do their due diligence in writing about his bill. In remarks he made on the floor of the state senate, Patterson singled out one-such who, he said, not only got it wrong but refused to correct her error when it was pointed out to her. "Obviously, none of these professionals read the bill; none listened while we had our interview; but rather they relied on what was reported erroneously over and over and over again…. These professionals have chosen not to get it right, so how can we, the people, trust them to provide us with accurate information?"

We can't. Some of the best known, most trusted, most experienced "legitimate" journalists (the name Dan Rather comes to mind, for one) have proven themselves as perfidious and untrustworthy as any unaccountable nameless no-account making anonymous posts on internet trash sites. But in fact, the Dan Rathers of the world are more dangerous because they carry the trappings of legitimacy, make a showy pretence of objectivity, and then with professional finesse, deftly distort the news to fit their personal political agenda. Many people tend to give credence to what they say just because they have a big name, or write for a big-name publication, or work for a big-name network.

Patterson's bill would do nothing to solve that problem. It would, if anything, exacerbate it, enabling the leftist major-media establishment to become more entrenched, handing them gratuitously yet another tool to strengthen the liberal near-monopoly of print and broadcast network media.

That's why we need a free press, just as we need free speech. No government list of who is deemed to be a reliable reporter can be relied upon, any more than a government list of which of your neighbors is qualified to express an opinion over the backyard fence or which co-worker over the proverbial water fountain. Every person who wishes to practice journalism, whether as a career journalist or a citizen journalist, whether as a network anchor or a novice internet blogger, has -- and ought to have -- the right to do so. And the more the better. Sure, there will be a diversity of opinions expressed, many of them worthless, and a variety of statements represented as factual, many of which will be fabrications. You get that on the blogosphere, and you get it from many of the nation's most prestigious columnists.

Ultimately, consumers of news, opinion and information have to sort out for themselves what they consider to be reliable. Many of them will be mistaken in their judgment. Hopefully, most will not. But I trust the American people to make that determination more than I trust legislators or government bureaucrats to make it for them.

In the final analysis, there are really only two criteria that qualify someone to be a legitimate journalist: the ability to write with clarity and the ability (and inclination) to tell the truth. Based on the latter of those criteria, sadly, the majority of career "journalists" in this country at this point in our history don't qualify. I'll trust an honest amateur any day over a professional propagandist masquerading as "The Press."

Source: www.PerspicacityPress.com. Copyright © 2010 Rand Green Communications.
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