Journalists entertain all sorts of self-aggrandizing notions about what we do. The big one is that we are a profession, which we pretty clearly are not. We don't even really qualify as a trade. Professions generally have minimum qualifications. You need a degree in accounting to be an accountant, for example. And a tradesman, like a mechanic, or a furnace installer, requires a licence — something to prove you can actually do the job. Not a journalist. Journalists don't even have to finish high school Professions also tend to regulate themselves. If lawyers or doctors or pharmacists breach the clear ethical rules governing them, they can be formally charged and punished by their peers. The car mechanic or furnace installer can lose his licence. But regulating journalism? Out of the question, for the sake of democracy itself, my peers would argue. There are no national journalistic standards, and no way to enforce them if they existed. Journalists can root through people's garbage, mislead interview subjects to gain their confidence, appoint themselves arbiters of people's privacy, and decide whose story is worth public consideration, and whose isn't — the only people we answer to are our bosses. Most of us do try to tell the truth, but let's be clear: there isn't any law or regulation that says we even have to do that. Some big organizations have codes of conduct, others don't. Such rules as do exist are often interpretable. And anyway, what is the truth? There are many truths. No basic qualifications Our only legal leash is libel law, and we hire lawyers to deal with that. Massive blunders can be shrugged off. The day after the National Post printed a huge front page scoop in 2006, reporting that the Iranian parliament had voted to force Iranian Jews to wear identification badges, a member of the Asper family, which owned the paper at the time, conceded the story was complete malarkey. But, he added, it "wasn't a stretch." You know, it could have happened. The editor-in-chief was still the editor-in-chief the next day. Journalists also resist any effort to formally define the job. In 1988, the federal government wanted to include journalism on the list of occupations that would enjoy relatively free cross-border movement under the first Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. But that meant setting down in law a set of basic qualifications — like a journalism degree — and journalistic organizations put up such a fuss that the idea was dropped. The upshot: basically, anybody who says he or she is a journalist is a journalist.
from The Rebel and the NDP, why not to provoke Ezra Levant: Thanks Rachel Notley, for helping define what journalists are, or maybe aren't? by Neil Macdonald, CBC News.