I don't know if Wolf is a journalist. But I think his argument that he was practicing journalistic behavior is important. Far too many times, in the media as well as the rest of life, we rely on a label to tell us something about behavior, instead of looking at behavior to tell us what a person is, or accomplishes.

Wolf did not call himself a martyr. He called himself a journalist. The subjects of the video can be seen as "sources," and he refused to testify about them. He offered, fairly early in his incarceration, to provide the video itself, which is simply a recording of an event. When that offer was accepted he left.

If he had a degree in journalism and did this for his paper/magazine/website/news show, we would not question this behavior. He would be providing evidence about the event to the authorities and the public, and refusing to cross the line into assisting the authorities and betraying his sources. This is good journalistic behavior.

Regarding his subjectivity: everyone is subjective. The best a journalist can do is present the evidence as best they can and make their personal opinions clear, so others can interpret accordingly. To label oneself "fair and balanced," as we all know, does not imply anything of the sort. Personally, I trust less any journalist who is not self-reflective enough to see that their perspective affects the material they choose to include in a piece and the way they present that piece. A claim to objectivity is practically a guarantee of self-blindness, an attempt to deceive, or an abdication of journalistic responsibility. Wolf apparently knows this.

Many traditional journalists for respectable papers have not done as well in parsing the ethics and responsibilities of their role. So, is he a journalist? I don't know. There's debate even among dictionaries on what the primary definition of journalism is. One says a journalism is simply "reporting or photographing or editing news stories" (Princeton's WordNet); another says journalism doing that as a profession or business (Random House).

So it seems that if Wolf reaches a point where he can charge others for his news service, or sell his stories or video to other news outlets, he will be unquestionably a journalist. Perhaps then people will stop wondering what label to apply to him, and simply pay attention to the quality of work he provides.

A little research provides the following from Wolf's site:

After graduating high school, I briefly wrote for UC Santa Barbara’s Daily Nexus before taking an Internship at the Santa Barbara Independent where I worked for about six months writing blurbs for the news department.

After moving to San Francisco, I’ve been actively contributing articles and video reports for my blog as well as Indymedia. I have also written for the Haight Ashbury Beat.

I’m currently employed as the Outreach Director for peralta.TV, a department of the Peralta Community College District, and I am also an SAT teacher for the Kaplan Test preparation company.

Everyone has to start somewhere. Wolf has an interest and is pursuing this as a profession; because he's early in his career, people are questioning how he approaches it. Seems to me he is simply doing what he loves, and taking advantage of available technology to do it on his own terms.

No, it's not surprising in the least the government acted as they did. I think he should have made a copy of the tape for himself and handed the original over. But on the other hand, if he felt the police were going to mine the tape for potential suspects, and felt the tape's content to be incomplete or misleading, he might be justified in refusing the tape on the principle of harm limitation. A journalist should not share data that could adversely affect another individual unfairly.

An example would be if a tape began by showing person A hitting person B, but didn't show person B hurting person A immediately beforehand. Or if it showed someone going through a broken store window, but not the fact that they came upon the window already broken, and went through it to follow/rescue a child who went through the broken window beforehand.

For this reason I think he was right to refuse to testify about his tape, if possibly wrong about not turning the tape over. I haven't seen the tape and wasn't at the event, so I can't make that call.

As I said in my initial post, I don't actually claim to know if he is or is not a journalist. I don't call myself an author, despite having bylines under my own name in a regularly published paper (back in the '80s) and a great deal of writing, because it's not how I pay the bills. So I probably wouldn't call him a journalist by that definition.

One interesting thing I discovered on journalism.org (the Project for Excellence in Journalism) is that there is no hard-and-fast rule about where lines should be drawn. As a principle, the PEJ writes that journalists "must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience." Being unable to read his mind, none of us can definitively say whether Wolf is doing that or not, but we should defend his right to do so.

If he believes himself to be a journalist and is genuinely doing his best ethically, he's probably doing more than most professionals in the field. I might not agree with his approach, but short of madness or deception or causing harm to others, I think he should have the right to pursue the work.