In an age when anyone can quickly create their own website and report the news, is there really a distinction any longer between citizen and journalist? What’s more, is there really any basis for a distinction – in practice or in law?

The recent “bitter-gate” flap involving on-the-record remarks by Barack Obama at a “no press” event in San Francisco is instructive. A HuffPo blogger – and maxed-out Obama contributor -- recorded Obama’s remarks and then wrote about them on her blog. While some in the Leftosphere objected, even the Obama campaign acknowledges that they fully expected the remarks would become public. We therefore don’t need to consider the question of whether an event news because a candidate or celebrity or public official says it is news, or because it really is information to which the public is entitled.

The reaction to Fowler's blog post then is just another bump in the inexorable sorting out of what the First Amendment means in a society where every person with Internet access has his or her own global broadcasting and publishing facility. The issue is less the distinction between "citizen" and "journalist" and more whether the Founding Fathers ever contemplated such a distinction in the first place.

A close reading of the First Amendment and centuries of legal precedent says "no."

Somewhere along the way, America developed this notion of the “journalist” as some sort of royal priesthood, entitled to special rights and consideration that the ordinary rabble did not enjoy. That was, in large part, because of the practical obstacles to publishing a newspaper – much less in broadcasting over the airwaves.

Technology has now changed the paradigm. Each and every one of us has the ability to become the publisher of our own electronic newspaper or commentary magazine. Indeed, many of us, right, left, and center, have become latter-day versions of Benjamin Franklin Bache of the American Aurora, John Fenno of the Gazette of the United States or Philip Freneau of the National Gazette. Indeed, the pseudonymous semi-anonymity that many of us choose harks back to the practices of many of the Founders who published pseudonymous works within the pages of those newspapers of the 1790s. For that reason alone, Robert Cox of the Media Bloggers Association is quite right in the above quote with his recognition that there is nothing in the First Amendment – nor in the understanding of the framers – that justifies relegating bloggers (or the bulk of the citizenry) to some status below that of “The Press” in the eyes of the law and society. Or perhaps more accurately, there is nothing in those sources that justifies the elevation of "working journalists" above ordinary citizens in the eyes of the law.

UPDATE: Fellow teacher Darren at Right on the Left Coast brings up a similar point brought up by a different commentary from a different source. Drop by and check it out.

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