When you have a few minutes, don’t miss Civil Beat’s Sunday feature, “The Sunshine Blog,” which takes aim at a proposed bill (SB 1618) that would create a state agency to regulate the press, and presumably penalize reporters or news outlets that are said to have strayed from the journalistic straight and narrow.

Their proposed state-run Journalistic Ethics Commission would investigate complaints against journalists — perhaps even from legislators — and would have the power to punish news outlets or individual journalists if the commission found they had violated its code of ethics.

The offending journalists could face unspecified fines and “suspension or revocation of state media privileges, including press credentials for government-sponsored events.”

The bill leaves the development of a code of ethics and implementing rules to the proposed Journalistic Ethics Commission, to then be applied by a separate “journalistic ethics review board.”

The bill does not provide an appropriation to find this unwieldy operation.

The bill magnanimously provides that “independent journalists and bloggers with a readership of fewer than 10,000 per month shall be exempt from this chapter.” But even my small, one-person blog enjoyed 12,000+ visitors in the past 30 days, meaning only the smallest blogs will avoid dealing with the proposed ethics police.

Of course, there’s one fundamental flaw. The bill provides that the code of ethics shall “comply with” (whatever that means) the code of ethics adopted by the Society of Professional Journalists, although it also provides for “additional standards adopted by the commission….”

And here’s how SPJ describes its ethics code.

The SPJ Code of Ethics is a statement of abiding principles…. It is not a set of rules, rather a guide that encourages all who engage in journalism to take responsibility for the information they provide, regardless of medium. The code should be read as a whole; individual principles should not be taken out of context. It is not, nor can it be under the First Amendment, legally enforceable.

Again, for emphasis. According to SJP, its code of ethics “is not, nor can it be under the First Amendment, legally enforceable.”

One can only imagine what the sponsors of the bill envision it doing. Sponsors include names that would not occur to me as defenders of a free press, including the lead proponent, Senator Donna Mercado Kim.

Another couple of sponsors, Senators Donovan Dela Cruz and Glenn Wakai, are best known for their behind-the-scenes bullying of state agencies and their employees, while doing their best to keep their strong-arm antics out of public view.

Interestingly, today’s Sunshine Blog also reports that the Senate leadership has closed off the press box on the side of the Senate Chamber, which has traditionally been a spot where reporters could observe the proceedings and converse with members of the Senate.

The sudden closing off reporters traditional access to the senate press box eliminates any confidence that the goal of the proposed “Journalistic Ethics Commission” has anything at all to do with transparency and the public interest.