A language gripe which I haven’t mentioned lately is the treatment of “media” as a singular. I’ve given it up as a lost cause, but it damages discourse. People often think of “the media” as one thing. Obviously there are many media. This blog is a medium for information, no less than CNN is. But in common use, you don’t qualify as a medium unless either you’re a big corporation or a fortune-teller. Similarly, there’s a tendency to count people as “journalists” only if they work for a “medium” (or is it “a media”)? This leads to the idea that freedom of the press applies only to properly credentialed and accredited journalists and media.

This trend appears in Article 17 of the EU’s proposed Media Freedom Act, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation has strongly criticized.
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