Who is a Journalist?
And Who Gets to Decide?
I came to journalism sideways, which is to say I came to it the way many people do now: through the internet, through obsession, through making things before anyone was paying attention. I blogged and vlogged when online creation felt more like experimentation than industry. Later I became the directing editor of my undergraduate school’s academic journal, then a writing tutor, then a podcaster in 2021, and eventually a full-time publishing editor with a master’s degree in journalism from NYU. My career has unfolded in the blur between content creation, commentary, and reporting, which is exactly why the current panic over who is and is not a journalist feels so familiar to me. I have lived inside the blur.
That panic is everywhere now, especially online. People want a bright line. They want a license, a credential, a byline count, a diploma, a masthead, a union card, a blue check, something they can point to and say: there, that is journalism, and that is not.
But the American tradition has never really worked that way. The better question is not simply who is a journalist. It is who gets to decide. And in a free society, the most dangerous answer is the state.
The First Amendment is startlingly concise about this. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...” That is not just a protection for large newspapers. It is a structural limit on power. It places press freedom beside religion, speech, assembly, and petition because all of them are tools ordinary people use to resist coercion, expose abuse, and contest official narratives. The press clause protects the act of gathering and publishing matters of public concern. That matters because once the government starts deciding who counts as “real press,” journalism stops being a right and starts becoming a permission slip.
American law has generally resisted that move. There is no federal license to practice journalism. Freedom Forum notes there is no official government certification process that qualifies someone as a journalist, and courts have repeatedly treated press freedom as broader than legacy newsrooms. In Obsidian Finance Group v. Cox, the Ninth Circuit held that First Amendment protections in a defamation case were not reserved for institutional media defendants. At the same time, Branzburg v. Hayes reminds us that being called a journalist does not place someone above the law; reporters do not get an automatic constitutional right to refuse every subpoena. In other words: the category is broad, but not magical.
And yet none of this means all people who publish are practicing journalism well. That is where the online discourse goes wrong. It jumps too quickly to “is / isn’t” and skips over “good / bad.” A lot of harmful media is harmful not because it fails some mystical membership test, but because it abandons verification, proportionality, transparency, or basic human care.
To see that, it helps to start with bad examples.
Alex Jones is the vulgar end of the spectrum, but also one of the clearest. He built a business around performance, conspiracy, and emotional escalation, then turned the massacre at Sandy Hook into a years-long campaign of falsehood. The legal consequences were enormous: Connecticut jurors awarded Sandy Hook families and an FBI agent $965 million in compensatory damages in 2022, and Jones also lost in Texas. Courts later upheld the Connecticut verdict, while the U.S. Supreme Court declined to disturb the judgment. During unrelated custody litigation in 2017, Jones’ lawyer described his on-air persona as a kind of “performance art,” a public argument that foreshadowed the more basic truth at the heart of the Sandy Hook cases: entertainment-style provocation is not immunized from defamation when it causes real-world harm.
Jones is useful not because he is normal, but because he strips away the comforting language people use to excuse misconduct. He was not “just asking questions.” He was not practicing adversarial journalism. He was monetizing unreality.
When people say the press should be free, they often forget the corollary: a free press is still accountable for lying. New York Times v. Sullivan did not create a right to fabricate. It created a high constitutional bar for public officials to win defamation suits, requiring proof of “actual malice,” meaning knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for truth. That standard exists to protect robust reporting, dissent, and inevitable error, not deliberate falsehood wrapped in theatrical rage.
A more mainstream case is Tucker Carlson, because he illustrates how opinion programming can borrow the aesthetics of journalism while relying on legal defenses that sound a lot like disclaimers.
In a 2020 defamation ruling involving Carlson, a federal judge held that the challenged statements on Tucker Carlson Tonight were not reasonably understood as factual assertions in context, describing the show’s “general tenor” as exaggeration and “non-literal commentary” and saying a reasonable viewer would approach Carlson with skepticism. That did not mean Fox “isn’t technically news;” it meant this particular program operated as opinionated punditry, not sober factual reporting, in the eyes of the court. Carlson later left Fox days after the network’s $787.5 million Dominion settlement, though Fox never publicly gave a full explanation for his exit.
Opinion has always been part of the press. The problem begins when commentary borrows the authority of reporting without submitting to reporting’s discipline. When hosts imply they are simply telling viewers “the facts” while their own legal defenses insist they are doing something looser, hotter, and less literal, audiences are being trained to confuse confidence with evidence. That confusion is poison.
Then there is Stephen Glass, the patron saint of journalism students’ worst nightmares. In 1998, Glass, then a star writer at The New Republic, was exposed for fabricating material in story after story. His downfall began when Forbes reporter Adam Penenberg — who runs the program I graduated from by the way — tried to verify a too-perfect Glass story about a teenage hacker and found that the company at the center of it appeared not to exist.
What followed was one of the most infamous unravelings in American magazine history: false notes, false websites, false sources, false scenes, false worlds. The scandal endures because it demonstrates something brutal and simple: journalism can look polished, reported, and authoritative while being rotten at the core.
That is one reason I have never had much patience for credential worship. Stephen Glass had bylines. He had editors. He had prestige. He had an elite publication. He had the whole costume. What he lacked was truth. The profession did not save him from fraud; verification exposed him.
To understand why this tension is permanent, it helps to back up.
American journalism was never born pure. Early newspapers were often openly partisan, subsidized by political factions and designed less to neutrally inform than to persuade. The press has always contained propaganda, boosterism, crusading, muckraking, and spectacle alongside admirable reporting.
By the 1890s, so-called “yellow journalism” — associated especially with the circulation wars between Hearst and Pulitzer papers — turned sensationalism into a commercial weapon. The phrase itself emerged to describe a lurid, attention-maximizing style that helped define an era.
The modern ideal of a more disciplined, less nakedly partisan press came partly through institutional development.
The Associated Press was founded in 1846 by New York newspapers pooling resources to cover the Mexican-American War, eventually becoming one of the defining engines of wire reporting in the United States. The New York Times was founded in 1851, and over time built a reputation around a more measured, document-driven model than many of its rivals. Neither institution is above criticism, and neither has been free of blind spots or failures. But their rise helped normalize a particular aspiration: that news should be gathered through methods sturdy enough to outlive the passions of the moment.
Then television rearranged the tempo. CNN’s 1980 launch created the first 24-hour cable news channel, turning what had once been a scheduled bulletin into a permanent atmosphere. The joke from Anchorman — that the news just keeps going whether or not anything proportional is happening — lands because it contains a truth: when airtime must be filled continuously, heat becomes a business model. Panels multiply. Urgency inflates. Breaking becomes a tone more than a fact. The internet took that pressure and detonated it. Suddenly everyone could publish, correct, clip, react, livestream, post screenshots, start a newsletter, build an audience, and become their own distribution system. That was democratizing and destabilizing at the same time.
This is why malicious intent matters so much in American press law. The “actual malice” rule from New York Times v. Sullivan is often misunderstood by non-lawyers as a permission slip for sloppiness. It is the opposite.
The standard is high because journalism in a democracy must be free enough to investigate powerful people without being bankrupted for every honest mistake. But the rule also draws a line: knowingly false statements, or statements published with reckless disregard for truth, are not the same as aggressive reporting. The legal protection exists precisely because the work is supposed to be oriented toward truth-seeking, not fraud.
That brings us back to the online argument everyone keeps having with the subtlety of a kitchen fire: what kind of journalism are we even talking about?
Hard news is the closest thing the public has to a common civic ledger. It prioritizes verified facts, timely relevance, attribution, and restraint. The point is not to empty the work of judgment, but to keep interpretation from outrunning what can be shown.
Investigative journalism goes further. It usually takes more time, more sourcing, more records, more adversarial pressure, and more legal risk. It is not simply “deeper hard news;” it is often a methodical attempt to uncover what powerful actors wanted hidden.
Feature writing, explanatory journalism, analysis, criticism, columns, essays, reviews, and beat reporting all operate differently, though they may overlap. Confusion begins when audiences treat all nonfiction publishing as one undifferentiated blob.
But, more relevant I suppose, there are also newer or more contested frameworks.
Solutions Journalism Network defines solutions journalism as rigorous reporting on responses to social problems, done critically rather than as feel-good boosterism. Properly practiced, it is not activism in disguise; it is reporting that asks not only what is broken but what is being tried, with evidence.
Advocacy journalism is more openly point-of-view driven. Scholars define it as a genre that combines reporting with a declared perspective. That can produce vital accountability work, especially for marginalized communities long ignored by mainstream outlets. But it also carries obvious ethical strain: when you are attached to an outcome, you have to work twice as hard to keep evidence from becoming a prop.
Citizen journalism, meanwhile, refers broadly to unaffiliated people gathering and sharing news through social platforms, blogs, newsletters, or eyewitness reporting. It can be indispensable, especially at the scene of breaking events. It can also be wildly unreliable.
The Society of Professional Journalists gets something important exactly right in its code: the ethics are not legally enforceable, and they are not limited to one platform. The code is a guide for “all who engage in journalism,” regardless of medium.
Seek truth and report it.
Minimize harm.
Act independently.
Be accountable and transparent.
That framework is not perfect, but it is vastly more useful than trying to decide whether a podcaster, newsletter writer, document diver, or local blogger is allowed into the sacred guild.
Which is why the strongest version of this argument, to me, is also the least glamorous: journalism is not a status identity first. It is a relational and ethical practice. You may call yourself a journalist. Your audience may accept that description. But what ultimately gives the label moral weight is the work — how information is gathered, tested, attributed, contextualized, and corrected.
Take Aaron Parnas, who presents himself publicly as an attorney, creator, and independent reporter, and who has also written for MediaTouch’s news site. He has built a large following by rapidly packaging political developments for social-first audiences.
That model is not inherently disreputable. News aggregation is a real media function. Curation has value. Translation has value. Speed has value. But aggregation is not the same thing as original reporting, and audiences often collapse the difference.
When one person becomes the singular trusted narrator through whom every event must be filtered, the audience is not just trusting reporting; it is trusting a branded interpreter. That can be useful. It can also be dangerous, because any blend of news, analysis, legal reading, and personality creates a dependency that is as emotional as it is informational.
Taylor Lorenz illustrates a different tension. She is unquestionably a journalist by training, bylines, and career history; she has reported for The New York Times and The Washington Post. In 2024 she left the Post and began publishing independently after a series of public controversies, including posts calling President Joe Biden a “war criminal.” That move itself is not disqualifying — journalists have long moved between institutions and independent publishing — but Lorenz’s work increasingly demonstrates the risks that come when reporting, commentary, and personal brand become indistinguishable.
Her 2025 WIRED reporting on the Democratic influencer initiative known as “Chorus” attempted to expose a network of paid online voices promoting Democratic messaging. Lorenz reported that the project involved contracts, payments to creators, and nondisclosure agreements. Those claims raised questions about transparency in political influence online. But the framing of the story — particularly the repeated use of the term “dark money” — was widely criticized for stretching a legal term beyond its normal meaning. In U.S. campaign finance law, “dark money” generally refers to political spending by organizations that are not required to disclose donors. Lorenz’s reporting did not establish that standard, which made the rhetoric feel more like advocacy than investigation.
The larger issue is the pattern of Lorenz positioning contested reporting as definitive exposé while simultaneously defending it through the authority of journalism itself. She frequently invokes the legitimacy of her institutional background while operating in a hybrid space where reporting, commentary, and social media persona are inseparable.
That hybridization has only accelerated as Lorenz increasingly participates in online political commentary spaces. She has appeared multiple times on streams hosted by the political streamer Destiny, engaging in long-form debates and defending her work in front of live audiences that operate more like fan communities than traditional news audiences.
There is nothing inherently wrong with journalists appearing on new media platforms. But Twitch streams are fundamentally commentary ecosystems. They reward speed, personality, and rhetorical dominance, not verification. They function closer to talk radio than reporting.
And importantly, most of the streamers themselves do not claim to be journalists.
Figures like Destiny and Hasan Piker operate openly as political commentators and entertainers. Piker has worn a press vest while live-streaming protests — a visual that understandably confuses audiences — but his work is primarily ideological commentary delivered through livestream performance.
Then there is a messier and more troubling category: the self-appointed online investigator or blogger who handles explosive abuse testimony without the discipline, boundaries, or source-protection habits the work requires.
Publicly available material around the Sascha Riley allegations and Lisa Voldeng’s role in circulating them is a case study in why process matters as much as belief.
I cannot independently verify Riley’s allegations. I also cannot say, on the basis of public internet material alone, what legal avenues were open or foreclosed. But the ethical problem is visible even without resolving the truth of the claims: publishing hours of highly graphic, unvetted testimony into a virality machine is not trauma-informed reporting, and it is not automatically responsible simply because the allegations are serious.
Public posting can contaminate memories, shape witness expectations, inflame online crowds, and make later evidentiary assessment harder. That is true whether the testimony is partly wrong, wholly right, or somewhere in between. The issue is not skepticism toward survivors. It is whether the handling of testimony serves truth and safety rather than spectacle.
This is the part people least like to hear: good intentions do not substitute for method. Believing you are helping is not the same as helping. Feeling morally certain is not the same as reporting. Wanting justice is not the same as building a record that can survive scrutiny.
That is also why I resist the idea that journalism must be emotionless to be ethical. It does not.
The old objectivity debates have confused style with method for generations. Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach argue that journalism is best understood as a “discipline of verification,” and that insight remains the cleanest definition I know.
The point is not that journalists become neutral robots. The point is that they submit their beliefs, hunches, and commitments to a process strong enough to keep evidence in command. Rosenstiel puts it bluntly: the method is objective, not the journalist.
That matters to me personally because my own reporting lives in a place many people would instantly distrust.
I report on cults, churches, coercive groups, and high-control religion. I am not religious. I am openly critical of Christian power structures, especially when they become abusive, politically manipulative, or insulated from scrutiny. I had a podcast called The Cult of Christianity. I haven’t minced words.
Some readers will call that bias. Fine. It is.
The real question is what I do with it. Do I disclose my angle? Do I source carefully? Do I distinguish what I know from what I suspect? Do I attribute? Do I correct? Do I avoid laundering internet rumors into false certainty? Do I treat vulnerable people as people rather than content?
Those are journalism questions. The mere fact that I have a point of view is not disqualifying. Pretending I do not would be less honest.
That is also why I am comfortable with a bend-don’t-break approach to the craft.
Not every piece needs to satisfy a courtroom’s evidentiary standard. Journalism is not litigation. Some stories are exploratory. Some are provisional. Some are attempts to map what is known, what is missing, what can be falsified, and what deserves more reporting.
But “not a court standard” cannot become “anything goes.” The floor is still discipline. The floor is still verification. The floor is still attribution. The floor is still minimizing harm.
My own reporting project, The Sebring Files, sits in that tension. It uses traditional investigative tools — records, maps, property history, sourcing, contextual research — while also inhabiting the modern internet reality of crowdsourced tips, public speculation, archival sleuthing, and debunking. To some legacy gatekeepers, that hybridity can look suspicious.
To me, it looks like the current condition of independent investigative work. The job is not to pretend the internet does not exist. The job is to keep it from destroying the methodology of sourcing ethically.
And that, finally, is why the “who counts” discourse is so unsatisfying. Not because definitions are useless, but because they are too shallow for the real problem.
There are anchors who mostly read scripts and anchors who do substantial reporting. There are pundits with reporting backgrounds who no longer report. There are commentators who never claim otherwise. There are analysts who add genuine expertise and analysts who add only tone. There are newsletter writers doing better shoe-leather work than some metro desks. There are credentialed stars doing worse verification than anonymous hobbyists.
“Journalist” is not a purity badge. It is a description that only means something if the practice behind it holds.
The point, then, should not be to build a smaller club. It should be to build a more media-literate public.
Not everyone needs to be a journalist, but everyone should be media literate. People should know the difference between original reporting and aggregation, between eyewitness footage and verified context, between commentary and documentation, between sourcing and vibes, between disclosure and stealth persuasion. They should understand that mainstream media is not the only traditional news, that independent journalism does not have to mean influencer theater, and that trusting one or two favored personalities is not a substitute for reading broadly and checking claims.
Because in the end, journalism is not special. It is important, but it is not sacred in the way some professionals want it to be. It is one of the ordinary tools of democratic life. It exists so that people outside power can document what power does. It exists so that official stories can be tested, not merely repeated. It exists because when institutions fail, records still matter. Witnesses still matter. Public memory still matters.
And so my answer, after all this, is both broad and demanding.
Who is a journalist? Potentially, almost anyone who undertakes the work.
Who gets to decide? In a free country, not the government, not the newsroom guild, not the social media algorithms, and not the loudest fandom online.
What makes the title worth anything? Discipline. Verification. Transparency. Accountability. A willingness to show your work and be corrected.
My favorite definition still holds: journalism is a discipline of verification. Where there is no discipline, or no verification, I stop caring what costume the person is wearing.
And where those things do exist — even imperfectly, even independently, even outside the old institutions — journalism is alive.