some terminology developments

[Victor Steinbok]

The Atlantic has an article from March 2012 on the supposed origin of
the term "American Exceptionalism".

http://goo.gl/lZmAS

Although they correctly point to the collocation circulating in the US
Communist Party documents in the early 1930s, the attribution to Stalin
is rather ludicrous. The article has resurfaced due to the ebb and flow
of conservative politics. Josh Marshall, apparently not realizing that
the article is 18 months old, takes them to task for ignoring that the
meaning of the term as used by the Communists was quite different from
its current incarnation, which, he suggests, took root in post-WWII
political economy. I suspect he's off by more than a few decades (the
Reagan-Bush version is built on popular Protestant notions of American
Exceptionalism--not quite so-named--from the 1800s), but certainly the
neoconservative philosophy that makes regular use of the term dates back
to that period.

http://goo.gl/OqnZxl

The other issue is that we now have a new, legal definition of
"journalist", although, more specifically, the new Senate definition
applies to "covered journalists" (presumably as opposed to newbie
bloggers they want to exclude).

http://goo.gl/Wel2rA

The most important distinction seems to be that "covered journalists"
must derive a fraction of their income from their "journalism" work. To
compound the problem, federal judges are authorized to declare others to
be "covered" as well.

     VS-)

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