What about the Public unintellectuals? Like the parrot, ackerman, bolt, devine, henderson, sandilands et al. Spineless weasels with their hysterical sensationalism and fearmongering. Not to mention their sudden elevation to climate scholars. Talk about spouting off on things you know nothing about.
Do the abovementioned have any credentials or academic qualifications in anything?
Sure doesnt stop them spewing bile on any topic they feel will up their ratings.
These are the sort of miscreants who need regulating.

On a serious note, its only the poor who are intensively regulated. In recent years, regulation of business has receded, as its well-connected and powerful lobbyists ply their mates in power with party donations, tantamount to bribery. In our free-market authoritarian state, billions are expended on the poor to keep them poor, and regulate and control them. From our hopeless employment/job network system that operates mainly to keep dole people under the thumb, to money spend on wasteful case management and micky mouse courses for essentially unskilled occupations, its all a waste but hey, it keeps em down and allows the mediocre progeny of the rich, favored by their parents that is, to ascend rapidly. Yet a pauper can't get many courses of study funded where they're not at TAFE or University, paupers don't get anyone paying for their books, paupers have no mates in power, paupers are shunted into serfdom and immigration keeps the labor supply in overflow so house prices stay high and a liveable wage becomes just a dream.

mikk: my proposal does not involve anyone - right, left, or elsewhere; qualified or unqualified - being prevented from speaking or writing. Free speech is an important part of our culture. All I am suggesting is that the right to hold oneself out as a Public Intellectual should be regulated. As it is for vets, quantity surveyors, carpet layers and plumbers.

First requirement of a public intellectual is to be condescending to the public.
Second is the ability to sneer at those members of the public who may not share the view of the usually self appointed intellectual.

I much prefer Michael Leunig's term "screeching ninny".

Calling oneself, or being hailed as, or actually being intelligent enough to be considered a "public intellectual" does guarantee that one actually has anything worthwhile to say, or that one is a particularly insightful, moral, or even agreeable person.

Consider, for instance, Noam Chomsky or Richard Perle. No doubt highly intelligent, and widely hailed as intellectuals by folk of their respective ideological stripe, but both utterly monstrous human beings.

I can see a South Park episode, actually two!

After a self-induced head trauma Cartman is found to posess a psychic crime fighting ability and is recruited by the SP police department to catch the left hand serial killer. He then finds himself hounded by 'real' psychic detectives who insist that to ply their trade he must "fill out the form on the back of the comic book and pay the $25 fee for the degree from the Psychic Detective School."

Then there was Butters as 'boy with balls on chin' who got in to hot water with the Union of Talkshow Freaks (no fakers allowed).

In our free society it's fine if people want to claim intellectual superiority, they can also wear tin foil hats and live in a bunker waiting for the green men to save them from the apocalypse... free society. This phenomenom of self-assumed authority though does become a problem when our media and government start being parties to the deception. If this is going to happen, and to an extent it is, then yeah it makes genuine sense to regulate the racket.