Doctors have one. Lawyers have one. Plumbers, beauticians, people who brush dogs' teeth. All are licensed, and all can lose their license if they are negligent -- or malevolent -- and break the rules that allow them to do what they do.

Yet Journalists, who constantly refer to what they do as a "profession," are not professionals in any usual sense of that word. No, they are employees, usually of media companies, and it is their employers who grant them their status to practice their "profession."

And what are the economic incentives of their employers? To report news in a credible fashion? Sometimes. But more often it is to SELL a product, by catching the interest of the reader / viewer / listener.

I propose that if Journalists want to claim some shred of professionalism, that they establish a licensing board and a disciplinary process. Victims of defamation or bad reporting could file complaints with the licensing board and, if found guilty, Journalists could be disciplined with various kinds of sanctions, including license revocation.

Of course, this would not prevent anyone who wants to from writing or publishing whatever they please. But within the subset of the braying mob -- from Judith Miller to Krauthammer to Ann Coulter to Brit Hume -- there could be a cadre of actual licensed professionals, who are actually held to a set of objective standards for their work, and whose work would therefore be presumed to be more credible than that of the unlicensed.

I just posted this in response to Glenn Greenwald's article, but it is just as appropriate here:

Doctors have one. Lawyers have one. Plumbers, beauticians, people who brush dogs' teeth. All are licensed, and all can lose their license if they are negligent -- or malevolent -- and break the rules that allow them to do what they do.

Yet Journalists, who constantly refer to what they do as a "profession," are not professionals in any usual sense of that word. No, they are employees, usually of media companies, and it is their employers who grant them their status to practice their "profession."

And what are the economic incentives of their employers? To report news in a credible fashion? Sometimes. But more often it is to SELL a product, by catching the interest of the reader / viewer / listener.

I propose that if Journalists want to claim some shred of professionalism, that they establish a licensing board and a disciplinary process. Victims of defamation or bad reporting could file complaints with the licensing board and, if found guilty, Journalists could be disciplined with various kinds of sanctions, including license revocation.

Of course, this would not prevent anyone who wants to from writing or publishing whatever they please. But within the subset of the braying mob -- from Judith Miller to Krauthammer to Ann Coulter to Brit Hume -- there could be a cadre of actual licensed professionals, who are actually held to a set of objective standards for their work, and whose work would therefore be presumed to be more credible than that of the unlicensed.

... and is arguably the best value breakfast in San Francisco too. Sure, they don't serve gourmet coffee, but the bacon, eggs, and yes, the french toast, really are excellent. And I don't have response bias. I've eaten there maybe five or six times over the past ten years, when brought there by a local friend, and every time I walk out thinking I really should eat there more often. I also think about how I've just had a better, quicker breakfast for about ten bucks or less than what I would get at virtually any hotel, and in particular at many five-star hotels like the Ritz-Carlton, for about twenty-five bucks.

Love your column Farhad, but you've done Fred's a disservice.

I always love how economists reduce complex problems to tidy battles of discrete "variables," and then float off into the clouds of a rarefied debate over whose data is correct and how it should be interpreted.

Meanwhile, anyone with a 2-digit IQ and a third-grade education can tell you that the status quo needs to change.

Even if you think global warming is hogwash, there are sound reasons not to pollute. As one writer posted here, try living in a coal village in China.

Coal-fired power plants are dirty, stupid ways to generate power. Anyone who has spent any time at all looking at the issue cannot avoid this obvious fact. They are gigantic pollution-machines, that pump out huge quantities of particulates and toxic gases that poison the local environments where they're located, not to mention their macro-climate effects such as global warming.

Cleaner energy sources, whether nuclear, geothermal, wind-powered, or from fart-gas, are far less dirty. Imposing a tax on polluters that forces them to pay for the "externality" costs caused by their polluting is not, as Bidness interests would have you believe, some kind of socialism. It is simply a community making sure that the cost of bad behavior -- polluting -- is at least partially borne by the Bad Actor committing the Bad Act. Think of the imposition of such a tax as a corollary to the Golden Rule: if you do unto me and my neighbors and cause us harm, we are going to get together and do unto you to make damn sure you pay for the damage.