Who’s a Journalist?

Journalism, It was said by one eminent practitioner, was once “a craft to be mastered in four days, and abandoned at the first sign of a better job.” That was H.L. Mencken. Half a century ago he made sport of journalism’s pretensions and those who sought to “inject plausible theories into its practice, and rid it of its old casualness and opportunism.” Journalism, a profession? Mencken scoffed at the idea. Lawyers and doctors, he observed, could regulate and license those who practiced their professions. The journalist, he noted, “is unable, as yet, to control admission to his craft.”