"You may not be a journalist, but you have a journalist's sensibility. You may not have done the shoe leather thing or had formal training in the art or its rules, but you know that the bottom line is truth and fact. Maybe I'm old school, but I was taught that factual error, whether through carelessness, haste, or bias, is absolutely unacceptable. I remember the old adage, "Get it right and get it first. In that order." Those who have a slavish devotion to those rules are journalists.
Licensing journalists might at least vet content producers. That's what media used to do. If you had a job at the Tribune or NYT or CBS, what you reported had some credibility. Now, who knows? With no filters, we all have to vet our own information. Many people don't do that. It's one reason the public believes so many "facts" that are not true.
Licensing journalists won't change a thing, except that it would give consumers some way to consider the source. Ironically, that's the first thing real journalists are trained to do--consider the source."
