I don’t see it as much different than the general societal norms that we tend to teach children, like “try to be nice” and “it’s okay to avoid people who aren’t nice.” Is that a violation of freedom of speech, or some top-down regulation? I don’t think so.

It probably shouldn’t be “licensing” in the sense of using state or otherwise organized violence to seek out people who violate the norms. We generally don’t teach people to punch anyone in the face who is rude. But having general standards of conduct don’t seem to bad to me.

Licensing or regulation is a very particular construct in relation to employment, and nothing like education of ethics.

I am on board with ethics education as a way to impart societal values. I'm pretty sure it's a component in most journalism degrees, but perhaps it should be part of early education more distinctly as well.

There is no accountability, no repercussions [1] for causing any amount of personal and economic damage. No real need to offer retraction and corrections even when reporting isn't just unethical, but also blatantly wrong.

If you want an easy example look at this Super Micro spy chip story [2] by Bloomberg Businessweek. It's absolutely unsubstantiated [3], caused 40% drop for SM share price, but two years later it's still up.

[1] except that one time Tiel funded a lawsuit

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

[3] https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/22/super_micro_chinese_s...

I'm not saying there aren't consequences to the freedom, and the effects of social media make me wish we could ban entire publications at will, but it's the wrong direction to be thinking.

I must admit, the ability to sway stock prices is pretty far from what I worry about when I think of bad ethics in press, but it does happen to be the kind of thing that would make licensing prone to corruption. The money influencing that kind of corruption would be right at the door of the licensing body, just waiting for the first person to crack the door open.

For me this particular story was notable because it was the first time I had (barely) enough expertise to realise that story is really implausible and enough interest to follow it up.

It's not that rogue journalist influencing stock market is bad, it's bad, but that's not the point. What really bothers me is that that there are no mechanisms on media company level to punish or at least disincentivize faulty reporting.

We encounter misinformation on a daily basis, but can't do anything about it. We can't even notice it, unless topic in question happens to fall in our area of expertise.

I agree, it's going to be tough problem to navigate. I can't even come up with a vague ideological solution for it, let alone a good mechanism that is fair and robust against corruption. It's like being stuck inbetween one ideal and another. Freedom of information vs stopping the bad being caused by misinformation.

My optimistic side would hope that putting education in schools about misinformation and how to critically think about and analyze journalism could at least help the issue.

It seems to me that protecting sources and mandating some degree of truthfulness (like don't outright lie about verifiable facts, as some statements are not disprovable) are orthogonal to dictating the subject of the stories?

The AMA and bar associations are not without their issues either (they end up driving prices up since they have a monopoly on their service), but it seems to me that people don't have to worry about doctors doxxing their patients on social media or lawyers making deals behind a client's back as much. When it does happen, these professionals are usually ejected from their profession, which is a pretty big disincentive.

Maybe there could be an independent body like the EFF but capable of issuing penalties to the egregious companies, but not the individuals. Perhaps even cap the type of company that can receive penalties, in order to preserve the ability for small upstarts to succeed without giving a potentially corruptable governing body the tools to squash them under a veil of legitimacy.

If you license individuals, how do you categorize what is and is not journalism, and where do you stop? Photojournalists, blogs, for fun school magazines, local newspapers? Are radio shows journalism? Youtube channels? Do I become an unlicensed journalist if they hold misinformation? Thinking of the worst case, a corrupted governing body could quietly pick and choose who they want to take penalize for not practicing with a license, or penalize them out of existence even if they have one.

That benefits big news corps while stifling open/free journalism with risk. For one example of what I mean by that but in a different industry, I will never run a website that could have users upload media in my country, because we have no safe-harbour laws. If you are at risk of penalties, many people just won't start.