David McElroy

Do journalists have more rights than you do? Do you even know for sure what makes someone a journalist? And does the U.S. government have any business defining who’s a journalist and who’s not?

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has just inserted language into a bill that would limit who gets privileges as a journalist under the First Amendment. It would declare that those who get paid to report on the news are journalists, but those who don’t get paid for it aren’t journalists. She thinks that being a journalist is a special privilege (video). Under her rules, bloggers and “citizen journalists” aren’t journalists at all. This is wrong for journalism. It’s wrong for the law. But most importantly, it’s wrong for the average American.

How did we get to this point? Is Feinstein just an evil fascist, as Matt Drudge suggested about her on this issue? I don’t think so. She’s wrong, but it helps to understand what the underlying issues are.

In this country, we have freedom of the press because it’s mentioned in the First Amendment to the Constitution. (I’m not even going to get into the fact that we should have the right even without it being mentioned, because the government is given no power to taken that freedom away. I’m ignoring that because dealing with what the Constitution originally meant has nothing to do with how the law currently works here.) Because the First Amendment specifically says that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…,” the media in this country have traditionally enjoyed a wide degree of freedom.

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Is there anything more predictable than people using a hot news story to promote whatever political agenda they wanted to push anyway?

The tragic shooting at the Washington Navy Yard Monday is the latest example of this ugly partisan tendency. The bodies weren’t even cold before progressives started calling for more gun control. I started seeing calls for gun control on Facebook from progressives while the story was still being sorted out. Nobody knew whether there was one shooter or up to three of them, but lack of facts about what happened didn’t stop people from turning to their political agendas.

The news media can almost always be counted on to get something egregiously wrong in a story about guns. CNN provided the shocking moment of ignorance Monday when it referred to the weapon used as an “AR15 shotgun.” The AR-15 is one of the “assault weapons” that media frequently use to demonize guns of all sort, but it wasn’t even used in this shooting. It’s a specific type of weapon — and it’s not a shotgun — but that mention is enough to subtly embed fear of such a weapon into those who might have seen the graphic on the screen. Was it an accident? Yes. Was it inexcusable ignorance by people who don’t have a clue about guns? Yes.

For his part, Barack Obama quickly launched into a call for more gun control. (Oddly, he didn’t say anything about how this black shooter might look something like his son, if he had a son.) The gunman used a shotgun that he bought legally, because there was nothing about him that would have flagged him for the sort of background checks that progressives keep claiming will stop shootings. That didn’t stop Obama from pretending that his existing agenda would have stopped the shooting.

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If it weren’t for hateful bigots, I wouldn’t have any idea who the new Miss America is.

It’s hard for me to care one way or the other about who wins beauty pageants. (Excuse me. “Scholarship pageants.”) But the level of ignorance and bigotry involved in some people complaining because a woman of Indian ancestry won is disturbing.

After Nina Davuluri was crowned Miss America Sunday night, racist bigots took to Twitter to denounce an “Arab” — yes, seriously — winning the title. The sorts of people who would attack her for having Indian ancestry are the sorts who wouldn’t understand that India isn’t home to Arabs.

After Vanessa Williams was crowned the first black Miss America in 1983, some people grumbled, but they didn’t have the Internet to spread their bigotry for the whole world to see. I didn’t care one way or the other at the time, but some people did. They just didn’t like the idea of a black woman being held up as our ideal woman. (Don’t we all have a different idea of who the ideal woman is?)

The pageant isn’t “Miss White Girl Who Looks Like Me,” so it’s natural that people from different backgrounds are going to win. I assume that Davuluri was the best contestant this year. I don’t have a clue, but I also don’t have an opinion about who should have won last year or the year before that or pretty much any other year.

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