Is “citizen journalism” a real thing?
I think we need to redefine and rethink what “citizen journalism” means.
Elon Musk recently posted this.
“Please encourage more citizen journalism! You can do live video easily from your phone.
“More on-the-ground reporting from regular citizens will change the world.”
Yes, well …. Will it change the world for the better or the worse?
More “citizen journalism” would mean that we would have more access to information – that’s good – and it would also mean that information would be available without the filter of the professional media. That seems good and bad.
The phrase “citizen journalism” seems to imply that anybody can do journalism. That journalists have no no special skills or training that set them apart from “Joe with a smart phone.”
Is that true?
Journalists do learn some things, like …
- Research methods
- How to conduct interviews
- Writing and speaking skills
- Editing
- Fact checking
- Copyright issues
- Ethical issues, like protecting sources, etc.
Your average citizen doesn’t know about those things. From that perspective, we might think of “citizen journalist” the way we would think of “citizen doctor.”
At the same time, let’s be honest about professional journalism. It’s become more than a bit of a clown show. It’s hard to make the case that the professionals are doing all that much better than Joe with his smartphone could do. In fact, it often seems that part of the training of the “professional journalist” is learning how to bend and distort the news to follow an ideological agenda.
It does seem like it would be good to have access to more unfiltered information – straight from the street – so we can know what’s going on.
But those things can be cut and manipulated too. Video editing software is cheap. And now we have the additional threat of AI-generated or altered video.
We need more information sources, more eyes on what’s happening in the world, but we also need more professionals who can vet that stuff. But we need professionals who can do it honestly.
Trust in the news media is very low. And deservedly so. They pick what they want to cover and how they want to cover it to push us to think the way they want us to think.
It’s tempting to think that “citizen journalism” could serve as a corrective, but I have my doubts.
Imagine some event happens, and people are divided over what it means. Who has the time to sort through the thousands of “citizen journalist” perspectives to figure out what actually happened?
We can’t go back to the days where people had to submit their information to the reporter, and the reporter took it to the editor who got to decide what made it into the paper. We’re way past that. There’s no barrier to entry to getting your view out to the public.
But we need something like it – some modern analogy – where a trusted editor can cut through the nonsense and the AI-generated lies to tell us what really happened.
How are we going to do that?
It seems the current solution is to follow some YouTube commentator that you trust and see what he has to say about it. But that’s only going to increase tribalism.
What’s the solution? How do we get out of this mess?
