Jesus H. Christ on a 4000-euro claimer, I leave the country for a week and Dianne Fking Feinstein gets to redefine my profession?

Hey, Dianne, here's the thing on that First Amendment business. I get to define what you do for a living. And if I decide to define what you do for a living is to be a mewling apologist for the national-security community and a lapdog for the surveillance state, I get to do that, and I get to do it in a newspaper, or video, or on-line, or on a pamphlet stapled to a telephone pole outside your door, if I so choose. You get to sit there, collect your government salary, raise money from plutocrats, and shut...the...hell...up.

Which part of "Congress shall make no law..." do you not understand?

I think I mentioned a while back that, while I was in journalism school -- And, yes, I went to J-school. Don't let that get around, OK? -- we were all the time debating the notion of a shield law. It was the late, great George Reedy, without whom I likely would have been the one lawyer who broke the camel's back, who pointed out that, if we accepted a shield law, then we also would have to accept government's right to define who it would be that the shield law covered, which meant we had to accept the government's right essentially to define what a journalist was, and this way, George said, lay madness. He mentioned the Royal licenses against which colonial pamphleteers rebelled. And the Stamp Act. And the use of the post office to restrict the circulation of unpopular ideas, from abolitionist newspapers to the Comstock laws. (George believed that nothing repressive ever really was new.) Since he'd already written a brilliant book that pretty much said that the nature of the modern presidency made something like Watergate completely inevitable -- Read it, kidz. -- I tended to take George's clairvoyance on such matters quite seriously. And now I have Dianne Feinstein presuming to define what I do for a living. Wherever you are, George, take a bow.

The final hurdle for the Judiciary Committee was defining who is a journalist in the digital era. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) insisted on limiting the legal protection to "real reporters" and not, she said, a 17-year-old with his own website. "I can't support it if everyone who has a blog has a special privilege ... or if Edward Snowden were to sit down and write this stuff, he would have a privilege. I'm not going to go there," she said. Feinstein introduced an amendment that defines a "covered journalist" as someone who gathers and reports news for "an entity or service that disseminates news and information." The definition includes freelancers, part-timers and student journalists, and it permits a judge to go further and extend the protections to any "legitimate news-gathering activities." But the bill also makes it clear that the legal protection is not absolute. Federal officials still may "compel disclosure" from a journalist who has information that could stop or prevent crimes such as murder, kidnapping or child abduction or prevent "acts of terrorism" or significant harm to national security.

And out comes the kitty, screeching from the burlap. This isn't a law to protect journalists. If it were, that list of loopholes at the end wouldn't be quite so lengthy -- or quite so vague. (You can drive a team of ploughhorses through "information that could stop or prevent crimes such as...") This is a law to protect secrets. This is a law that redefines the exercise of a constitutional right as a privilege "protected" by the government. This is a law that allows the government to define what "the press" is under the First Amendment, and, my god, if that's not the primary consitutional heresy in that regard, I don't know what is. And I don't care that a judge can "extend" that privilege. That's not a judge's job, either.

I understand that we are going through an accelerated redefinition of what journalism is, and that technology has made the old definition of a journalist obsolete. (There are thousands of people in the upper echelons of this profession struggling with this question daily.) But there is nothing about the technology -- or about the effects that technology has had on the profession -- that requires us to abandon the fundamental requirement that journalism always -- and let us speak slowly, lest the gobshites misundertand us, a-l-w-a-y-s, is a profession outside of, and adversarial to, government, politics, and, yes, indeed, even the doings of the all-to-human, error-prone heroes of our intelligence apparatus. Nothing about the internet changes that.

It has been argued -- and, occasionally, by me -- that the worst thing that ever happened to journalism was that it became the professionalized province of the educated. (Rep. Marcy Kaptur once went round and round with me on this regarding modern political journalism's disdain for organized labor, and she was right.) There are far too many people right now in Washington who are far too comfortable in being a de facto part of the country's power structure. Their profession is not mine. Let me be quite clear. If you accept the Congress's right to define what a journalist is, you are a miserable traitor to the profession you presume to practice. You have, quite simply, become something less worthy than an informer, something lower than a jailhouse snitch. I'll leave it to my man Chuck Todd to take the king's shilling. Me? I'll stand with the 17-year old and his own website, and, with all the faith I ever have had in my constitutional right to do so, we both will tell Dianne Feinstein to fk off, thank you. Stuff your privilege. I have my rights.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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