- Slate has an article on the subject: Is an Anti-Abortion Activist With a Camera a Journalist?
Here's a chunk of its text:
. . . “the gathering and publishing of information doesn’t instantly make one a journalist, just like the sharing of legal information doesn’t instantly make one a lawyer or knowingly hypothesizing about an illness doesn’t make one a physician. In the latter two examples, the focus is on education, proof of knowledge, and the government’s own line-drawing in licensing lawyers and doctors. There is no government-issued license to practice journalism.” She argues that it will be left to us, the reading public, to draw the lines that courts and legislatures have struggled to clarify: “Unbiased consumers of information could well know journalism when they see it. These consumers believe in some publishers more than others because the publishers’ work is reliable and ethical and truthful, often or mostly published without bias or ideology. And that’s very similar to the way journalism has been defined in a traditional sense, long before we all became publishers.”
In other words, it’s entirely possible that even while Daleiden attempts to argue that what he did—or at least what he now says he was doing—is genuine journalism, there are real risks to the rest of us in allowing him to make such broad claims. We aren’t merely risking our privacy and our livelihoods by allowing anyone with a camera and an inextinguishable fantasy to call himself a reporter. We are courting the possibility that his nihilistic and cynical view of the profession could someday become the norm.
The videographer's problem seems to be the fraud he engaged in to get the footage. That does not seem to be covered by the First Amendment. The privileges reporters get seem to extent primarily extend to their ability to not have to testify about confidential sources.
The Supreme Court established this privilege in Branzburg v. Hayes.
- Click here for the decision.
