Whom does the First Amendment serve?
According to the results of this poll, most journalists think that the First Amendment to the US Constitution exists to serve journalists rather than all Americans. The online poll, posted by JournalismJobs.com, shows that more than half of the respondents (who can be safely assumed to be mostly journalists) think that blogers should not enjoy the same legal protections as journalists.

In fact, no one can define what a journlist is because no one can define what journalism is. Unlike the professions of law or medicine, for example, there is no distinctive training or education required to be a reporter (what "journalists" used to be called because that's all they actually do) and there is no mandatory licensing process. Individual news outlets may have internal requirements for education or credentials, but there is no industry-wide standard as there is for nearly every other profession.

Journalism is not really a profession at all. It is a craft or a vocation, but not a profession. The myth that journalism is a distinctive profession was pondered by Mediachannel.org, which asked the question, "What is a journalist?" and answered thus:

Most mainstream journalists don't acknowledge how their own ideologies (or the pressures of their employers) guide their work. Yet they are considered "real journalists" because of their insider status and where they stand in the pecking order of some media combine. However, note that in a world of so many diverse publications, multimedia outlets and Web sites, more and more people are defining themselves as journalists and in some instances even reinventing aspects of journalism, as with the Indy Media Centers. Outsiders have always fought to be recognized and validated. The late I. F. Stone, for one, virtually alone, went after the U.S. government's Vietnam polices with a small newsletter. History now considers him a media hero. A new Indian website is battling corruption by exposing it. "Private Eye," a satirical magazine in London, has long been an outlet for unsourced, anonymous insider dish 'n' dirt on the media business. It's not traditional "balanced" reporting but most journalists read it and love it. There are many more such examples.

American journalists have lost the respect of the American people over the past two decades. Telling millions of Americans who blog - and the millions more who will be blogging soon - that the First Amendment is the exclusive preserve of journalists hardly seems a way to get it back.