The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto asks tongue-in-cheek if Russia President Vladimir Putin would be a journalist under the definition set out in the journalist federal shield law pending in the U.S. Senate. Covered journalists would include those with a considerable amount of freelance work in the last five years. Taranto then wrote last Friday: "To answer the question our headline poses, at least the definition is not so broad as to encompass this week's most prominent newspaper writer, Vladimir Putin. His Thursday contribution to the New York Times--which he himself wrote, according to a spokesman for his PR firm in an email to BuzzFeed--was not his first. In a 1999 piece he defended his own government's effort to put down a violent rebellion in Chechnya. But since that's more than five years ago, it wouldn't count toward the 'considerable amount of freelance work' threshold."
Lawyer and Legal Journalist
