Journalists are different from other professions -- such as doctors and lawyers -- in two important ways:

» We are the only profession mentioned specifically in the Bill of Rights.

» We, unlike doctors and lawyers, are not required to get licensed to do what we do.

Because journalists are not licensed (because such a restriction would be a restriction on the freedom of the press, and a violation of the First Amendment), it is up to journalists to police each other to maintain the standards of the profession.

Being a cop on that beat is getting tougher all the time.

Take, for example, what happened last week with one Paul Fischer, an Australian movie critic and celebrity interviewer who most recently was covering the 2010 Sundance Film Festival in Park City.

Fischer is an old hand at the Hollywood junket game, and has a reputation for being a "quote whore" -- a critic who says nice things about movies nobody else likes, and therefore gets quoted in movie advertising.

Nothing wrong with that, within the hallowed rules of journalism.

But plagiarism is another matter, one the journalistic community reacts to quickly and sharply.

Fischer got caught lifting whole paragraphs, with little or no alteration, from the Sundance Film Festival's film guide and running them in several reviews he wrote for the Web sites Dark Horizons and Moviehole. Fischer got caught by Chris Parry, a writer for the Vancouver Sun , who has had some run-ins with Fischer before.

Within a day, Parry's story had bounced around the Web, blogged about by David Poland's Movie City News and Jeffrey Wells' Hollywood Elsewhere, and even tweeted by Roger Ebert. (I also opined about Fischer on the Movie Cricket blog, adding examples of his cribbing from the Sundance guide.) Within two days, Parry was reporting that Dark Horizons and Moviehole had removed Fischer's Sundance reviews from its sites -- and Dark Horizons' editors had told Parry that Fischer was retiring from the junket circuit immediately.

Fischer is getting off easy -- some embarrassment and a need for a new job -- compared to another guy claiming to be a journalist.

That guy -- James O'Keefe -- faces federal charges.

You might remember O'Keefe as the guy in the pimp costume, who successfully embarrassed employes of the community group ACORN into giving some unwise and possibly illegal tax advice. Video of O'Keefe's "undercover" work was distributed around the right-wing blogosphere, prompting a firestorm of protest that ultimately compelled Congress to cut off funding to ACORN.

O'Keefe, meanwhile, had become a darling of the GOP. He was even scheduled to speak to an event in Utah -- until what happened two weeks ago.

O'Keefe and three other men were arrested Jan. 25 by U.S. Marshals, accused of entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony. Two of the men were accused of trying to enter the New Orleans offices of Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., dressed as telephone repairmen, and tried to access the office's main telephone system closet. O'Keefe and the third cohort reportedly admitted to abetting the two men in costume.

O'Keefe has hit the conservative airwaves to defend himself, saying he and his friends were not trying to wiretap the Landrieu office phones --which would be a major-league felony -- but to learn whether Landrieu staffers were being honest when they claimed the office phones have been jammed for months by people trying to leave messages regarding Landrieu's stand on health-care reform.

O'Keefe calls what he does "journalism." Eric Alterman, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a longtime critic of conservative manipulation of the media, noted in a column (available at americanprogress.org) that O'Keefe is the product of "a long-term investment strategy by conservatives to rewrite the rules of professional journalism."

Conservative organizations, Alterman wrote, have been "funneling millions of dollars into college newspapers and training programs designed to overturn what they believe to be the mainstream media's liberal bias. In doing so, they are also working to subvert the media's professional standards."

By muddying the waters of what's considered good journalism, people like O'Keefe and his patrons get what they want anyway -- they make readers and viewers more skeptical and less trusting about the journalism practiced by those of us who do follow the rules.

Sean P. Means writes the Culture Vulture in daily blog form, at blogs.sltrib.com/vulture.