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‘Journalist’ should be a profession like ‘medical doctor’ or ’structural engineer’ or ‘electrician’ or ‘architect’. Anyone can still write anything and publish
by willyt 3y ago
‘Journalist’ should be a profession like ‘medical doctor’ or ’structural engineer’ or ‘electrician’ or ‘architect’. Anyone can still write anything and publish it wherever they want. But the words ‘News’ and ‘Journalist’ become legally protected. If you want to claim that what you have written is ‘News’ and that you are a ‘Journalist’ you have to be registered with a professional body and you have to sign every article that you write and claim as ‘news’. This signature is like a checksum that can be verified to check that a story hasn’t been changed and that the person who wrote it takes responsibility for it. You submit this to a register kept by your professional body. Mistakes and retractions are also kept on file there. If you make a lot of mistakes or consistently ignore standard practices like not using multiple sources or verifiable sources you will loose your right to claim to be a ‘Journalist’ and all your past articles would be called into question. You can still say or write whatever you want but you lose the right to call it news and claim you are a journalist. I think something like that would protect freedom of speech but also give a sense of responsibility to the profession. A bad doctor can accidentally kill a good few people over thier career but a bad journalist can incite war or unrest that could potentially kill many more people. E.g. WMDs in Iraq that didn’t exist.
- willyt 3y agoIn reply to downvotes: Interesting… Is it the idea of regulation that you disagree with? Do you also think that professionals like Structural engineers, Electricians and Doctors shouldn’t be regulated? Or is it the idea of protected words ‘e.g ‘Medical Doctor’ or ‘Prescription’?
- wholinator2 3y agoIf i might speak on some behalf, an adjacent question is what would a political agenda in structural engineering registration and certification look like? Then, what would a political agenda in the registration of journalists look like? It feels sorta like regulatory capture. Why would we allow the government or some central organizing body to determine who is legally allowed to report on them. Because introducing certifications turns it into a legal proceeding, possibly prosecutable with possibly steep penalties. Then we've just provided the infrastructure to jail dissenting journalists on a silver platter. Maybe if the world was in a better state we could trust anyone with the literal power over speech but have you seen the uproar over even corporate pseudo-control that exists now? Imagine a world where a President, instead of removing unfavorable journalists from his press conferences, revokes those journalists certifications and then jails them the next time they try to do their job. Okay, so it wouldn't be the president who has that power, who would you pick? Name a person who you trust with control over investigative speech itself. That's where all the downvotes are coming from. You can't just say, what if we regulated journalism legally. You have to also introduce a system that doesn't immediately descend into hell or people are gonna be way against you
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago[dead]