A Federal Judge Who Needs a Psychiatrist with a Sideline in Proctology A serious question in an Internet age is who qualifies as a journalist and therefore for press credentials and protection under shield laws and Times vs. Sullivan. Clearly a fifteen-year-old semiliterate garage-blogger should not. Clearly a site like The Unz Review should. How to decide and who decides are not easy questions.
Who should not decide is easy: the Federal Government. In Forbe’s, I find one Marco Hernandez, a federal judge of near-perfect ignorance, who lists seven requisites that in his view must be met if one is to be, in effect, a federally licensed journalist. (Note that Hernandez was appointed by Obama, consistently hostile to the press Federal jusges are not appointed for competence, but for allegiance.)
Anyway, Hernandez. For those of us who mightl have to work in the deep shadow of his overhanging brow ridges, this is bad news. Let us examine his requirements.
One: Education in journalism.
Surpassingly irrelevant.
I was an average mid-rank journalist. In 1973 I went to Israel to cover the Yom Kippur war for the Free-Lance Star of Fredericksburg, Virginia, my hometown paper. I then spent a year in Vietnam and Cambodia for Army Times, after which I spent some three decades writing either on staff or on contract from probably two dozen countries for the Washington Times, WashPost, Harper’s, Playboy, Soldier of Fortune, Universal Press Syndicate The American Conservative, on and on and on.
Now, this peckerwood judge tells me, and by implication many like me, that I am not a journalist because I have never taken a course in journalism. Neither have a dozen solid pros I could mention, guys who came of Nam, didn’t want some faggoty job like being a judge, which is to say a wannabe transvestite in a black nighty. If his decision was meant to apply only to me, it wouldn’t matter. But he wants to apply his thoughts, if they rise to that rank, to all.
It is worth noting that web journalists do not necessarily have minuscule circulations:
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