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Time for Federal Licensing of Journalists
It’s overdue. Most important jobs that involve the public have standards — not any old schlemiel can be a brain surgeon or a cosmetologist, you know. A federal credential would not only ensure reporters are vetted so they’re fair and accurate, it would make it easier to deal with those who practice journalism in unorthodox ways.
For example: At many public events, there’s a space for the journalists, so you know who’s reporting on the event; they have tags around their neck, indicating they are legitimate.
But some people think they can just flout the rules and write about something without the necessary tags, and so you get stories like this:
A Donald Trump campaign staffer and a private security guard removed a POLITICO reporter from a campaign rally here on Thursday evening for reporting at the event without the campaign’s permission.
A campaign staffer spotted the reporter typing on a laptop outside of the press pen at the San Jose Convention Center and asked the reporter, who was attending on a general admission ticket, if he had press credentials. The Trump campaign has refused to credential the reporter for multiple events.
That’s how it should be, right? It’s obvious this guy was trying to write something about the campaign, and permission had not been granted. He didn’t get the message. If you don’t have the proper laminated badge around your neck, what makes you think you can write about something?
It would make it easier to do something about those James O’Keefe types, too. They shouldn’t be allowed to do that.
Published in General
How?
Access to the facility where the conventions were held required visible credentials – big laminated slabs on a lanyard.
I don’t get the Andrew Sullivan reference.
The first amendment doesn’t do us any good if freedom of speech isn’t a national habit in other civic affairs and institutions.
How did the federal government suppress speech in this instance?
Out of curiosity, which Article of the Constitution specifies what our “national habits” are to be?
Note:
This presumes the worst of people. If you don't think you can engage in a thread more positively, don't engage.I love how the usual suspects and Trumpkin’s are defending a practice they would rightly criticize Hilary Clinton for if she had done it to a reporter from Vdare or Stormfront.
Amen. It shows they want to win rather than merely preen.
It shows that they pay lip services to notions of liberty and small government and really want an authoritarian in their corner rather than a return to founding principles.
Honest question: Would this story have invoked such an emotional response if instead of this sentence,
it read,
Isn’t this fact – this singular word – significant?
And if so, is Ben Schreckinger merely an incompetent journalist or something worse?
Are you talking about the 2009 incident? That story was about the Treasury Department not inviting Fox to a briefing, and while it’s a bit more complicated than it seemed at the time, it’s clear the Administration was happy to delegitimize Fox whenever the opportunity presented itself. It was petty, churlish behavior. Again, I don’t get the idea that eight years of pointing out the Obama administration’s sins somehow empowers the right to behave the same way when it’s their turn.
In any case, it’s not analogous. If the administration had revoked Fox’s credentials, then removed a reporter from the audience for taking notes, then it would be a similar case.
Whether the other journalists could do their job isn’t the point.
“That guy we don’t like is writing something. Kick him out.” That’s the point.
I didn’t know him from Adam’s left doorknob but looking at his twitter feed just now confirms my assumption that he was the one escorted out.
He also tweets that Trump is responsible for the violent thugs at the San Jose rally.
So, now I’ve heard of the guy, thanks to Ricochet.
And now I’m done with the guy.
Yes, the sort of liberty and small government we’ll get when Hillary is in charge? The principled non-authoritarianism that Clinton stands for, the woman who promises to continue with Obama’s rule by Executive Order?
Why is it so hard to accept that you have a binary choice in November (barring Hillary’s indictment, perhaps)? Whatever your objections are to Trump, can you paint the word picture that shows Hillary Clinton improves on him?
Yes.
Is it obliged to credential them? No. Must it allow them to shoot? Yes.
That may be your point, but unfortunately for your argument that’s not what happened. “That guy flagrantly violated our published rules for how journalists are to gain access to our private event” is what actually happened. You are spinning this, which is disappointing.
Just seems to me that any Article with No Names is just another typical attempt to Get the Story Out First and check details later. Because the details will prove this was a non-event, but the echomedia will keep repeating the First Story Out.
Trump didn’t do it; his people did it. The campaign is within its rights to credential whomever they like. But if they can kick out a guy in the cheap seats because he’s not going to write what they like, they can kick me out. Because they don’t want me to write what they think I’m going to write. Regardless of who the reporter is, you’re either fine with that, or you’re not.
Thanks to everyone for chiming in; I appreciate the contributions. Viva la Ricochet!
More spin. Sure, “not inviting” as in “these other news organizations are legitimate, but not Fox so we bar it from participation.” We agree on the analogic failure, but for different reasons. I’m inclined to view differently the behavior of an elected President acting in his official capacity, as opposed to a mere candidate to office conducting a private event. Agree?
What guy, which cheap seats, and why? James, this seems like arguing over what animal is depicted in a Rorschach test. For what purpose?
Alright, enough…next discussion.
Logistically how do you do that?
If they have a ticket from the local party that allows them floor access, sure. Everybody with a phone or camera is allowed to record.
But if candidate “A” (and it could be of any party) is holding an event in Williams Arena on the campus of the University of Minnesota, you’re still going to give credentialed crews a different level of access. The Secret Service is going to demand it.
The real problem of American journalism is not that we need more in the pack covering press conferences and rallies. The real problem is that not enough journalists are doing journalism, weeding out corruption and showing us the darker side of what’s going on at all levels of government.
You are not entitled to your own facts, as Senator Moynihan might have chimed in about now. That’s why you think he was kicked out. What’s your evidence? You think the staffer who observed him acting like a journalist had face recognition on the guy? What’s your evidence for that? How about Occam’s Razor here? He saw a guy acting like a journo, consulted with his superiors, then they took appropriate action based on the fact the journo had flagrantly violated their private-event rules for journalists.
It’s interesting that Trump gets tagged with authoritarianism, which isn’t to say he doesn’t encourage it at times with his off-key rhetoric. But the spin job on the actual facts of this event is emblematic of the sort of journalism practiced on behalf of authoritarian regimes stretching back to Pravda and Izvestia.
Afternoon EJHill,
I would like for journalists to be half as concerned with the integrity of their own profession as they are with government. They have been indifferent to deceit and propaganda pretending to be fact, and now what do we write about, “how Trump is against freedom of the press”. The press is distrusted by most and despised by many, the problem is not an exterior threat of press intimidation the problem is the systemic rot and self deceit which saturates the press at all levels down to our local papers. The press does not want to inform it wants to shape, we have to be told how we are think of events as if we are too uninformed to weigh the facts out for ourselves.
The problems with journalism are so manifold I don’t know where to begin. The rot begins with very idea of the celebrity journalist. That leads to shortcuts and shameless self promotion.
And as journalists became celebrities (and well paid) they began to socialize with people they were supposed to be covering. It’s just not enough, at that point, to not cover your relatives. You’re also in the position of covering the relatives of your friends and colleagues. That, too, is corrupting.
There’s a reason that some of the biggest successes of conservative journalism have come from hitherto unknown people persuing the truth. But even James O’Keefe is not immune to the trappings of celebrity.
Did Druge have a license ?
I’ve long appreciated Mr Lileks’s humor. Yet his tongue-in-cheek defense of journalistic honor has a whiff of sanctimoniousness about it. It falls flat because he’s defending members of the Pajama Boy Aristocracy so ably described by Victor Davis Hanson. See also Professor Hanson’s piece, wherein he quotes Euripides:
It fits, don’t you think?
Afternoon EJHill,
Thanks for your answer, at the national level where, politicians, journalists, lobbyists and everyone else is related to one another, as you note, everything is corrupted. My distress is that where bad docs, or bad lawyers, or bad priests may not be discovered by docs, or lawyers, or priests policing themselves, they can be exposed by individuals, or the press, or by legal actions. Other individuals who lie or manipulate for profit may be sued, or brought to disrepute, but not journalists. I live in Indianapolis, in over 50 years of paying hit or miss attention to our local news, repeatedly I know of articles or TV interviews in which the facts have been invented or the words of the subject for the interview have been edited to say the opposite of what he said (local tennis tournament) and no one is held accountable. Now what happens here is not the end of the world but when the news sustains a narrative that the police are out to kill minorities or the imprisonment of minorities is disproportionate, or that illegal immigration does not have negative repercussions (see VDH articles for the negative), the society can begin to believe in a history which is false. These false stories are helping to sap the hope out of our society, and journalists seem helpless or indifferent to the part they play. Thanks again for your reply.
That’s not true and demonstrably so. Rather was brought down and so was Brian Williams.
You can’t look at the Rolling Stone UVA fiasco without tipping your hat to the way the Washington Post reporters destroyed Sabrina Erdely’s story.
And there have been others drummed out of the business. Stephen Glass, Janet Cooke, Jayson Blair, Jack Kelly – all of them caught making it up and none still working.
Afternoon EJHill,
So we have Ed Bradley and 60 minutes trash Audi over sudden acceleration, which cost Audi millions, recently we try the same stunt with Toyota and you think your list shows how bad actors are penalized. We have reporters crying in New Orleans over Katrina, never mentioning the thousands of National Guard rescue missions creating a narrative to bring down Bush and show how our country does not care for minorities, and you say we caught Jason Blair. The theatricality of all the conflicts between Israel and its enemies is never presented in the major media. Photos are staged where little boys are throwing Malatov cocktails, and dead children are always the result of the IDF. Not mention the “babymilk factory”, and keeping quiet about the brutality of Saddam Hussein to maintain access, and you offer your list of journalists and your list is to show that this system has some ability to govern its deceit? I think you are proving my point that the problem is hopelessly deceitful.
Sometimes you equate malice where a charge of laziness suffices.
The problem with weeding out bad journalism is that you have to catch them lying, not merely citing sins of omission (no matter how egregious.)
There is lack of forensic journalism. Nobody goes back on a regular basis and re-examines how stories were covered and how well they were covered.
On the other hand, you may be giving them way too much credit. Depending on which survey you trust, the media is somewhere between 8% and 40% on the trust meter. And all of the surveys agree with one aspect. The younger you are the less you trust them.
Are we fighting a war over broadcast news and dead trees when battlefield is on Twitter and Facebook?