[80386]

If you don't rule out hobbyists, freelancers, and the self-employed, I can declare myself a journalist, start a blog or a Twitter, and start throwing Molotov cocktails, and if I get arrested for it, that's another arrest of a journalist.

And as a Molotov-cocktail-throwing opponent of the regime, I want to raise the number of arrests of journalists, because that makes the regime look bad, as shown by this thread. Even if every single arrest is of someone like me - a left-radical with a Twitter account, not Walter Cronkite or whoever - it's unlikely that anyone will bother to check, and even more unlikely that, if anyone bothers to check, very many other people will hear about it.

[slg]

Where is this trope of Molotov throwing journalists coming from? I have seen it multiple times in this thread and it is just bizarre. No one would consider someone throwing a Molotov a journalist, no one would count such an arrest as the arrest of a journalist, and no one would consider the arrest an attack on press freedom.