Brill's presentation

Steven Brill, the journalism watchdog behind Brill's Content, is a useful guy, I guess. It's not as if nobody ever did that sort of thing before him, but he claims his mag has 15 to 20 times the circulation of the likes of Columbia Journalism Review.

But he is one crappy after-dinner speaker. I heard him speak between the soup and entree courses at an Atlanta Press Club dinner the other night. Aside from screwing up dinner because he had to leave early, he was by turns pompous, dull and self-derivative (his one joke about lawyers getting more respect than journalists is part of his Web site FAQ).

I could have ignored that. But he also proposed two startlingly bad ideas:

1) He favors some sort of ethics tribunal like those that bar associations have, with the power to sanction. So, what, now we're gonna need a license to practice journalism? A license that can be pulled by those former high school council members that run the press club?

No. 2 was even worse. He thinks that news organizations that allow commercial considerations to affect their newsmaking decisions should lose First Amendment protection (the way advertising has lesser protection). A noble sentiment, but how would one determine that had happened? Through civil discovery proceedings, is the only way I can think of. He doesn't like libel suits, he sez, but he's all for opening up newsrooms to a blizzard of nuisance suits by people who claim filthy lucre led to their being defamed in the paper.

Geez, Steve, just keep reporting on journalism screwups and crookedness. Utopian fixes don't seem to be your strong suit.