HOWARD KURTZ reports on proposed shield legislation for journalists. It sounds bad to me:

Pence said the bill would cover online reporters for newsgathering organizations but not millions of individual bloggers.

I don’t see any justification for that distinction. I am at best lukewarm on the idea of shield laws like this, but if we have them, they should be based on the activity of journalism, not where your paycheck comes from, a notion that is increasingly obsolete. As I noted in a piece on the Vanessa Leggett case:

At any rate, a more relevant standard than “professional journalist” (though also not a First Amendment doctrine) would seem to be found in 42 U.S. Code section 2000aa, which forbids law enforcement agents from seizing “work product materials” or “other documents” possessed by a person “reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast or other similar form of public communication.”

It seems as if a similar model could apply here — though it’s not at all clear to me that it’s a good idea to create such a privilege to begin with. But to the extent that we do, it should be based on expression, not on possession of a guild card.