December 14, 2007
David Hazinski: 'Citizen Journalism' is a Bad Thing
David Hazinski, a former NBC correspondent and associate professor of telecommunications and head of broadcast news at the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism, has a bone to pick: he believes "citizen journalism" is dangerous.
We must protect the children!
Using scare quotes all througout the Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed, Hazinski worries that without "education, skill and standards," everyday hacks will ruin all that has been achieved by "trusted professionals" and create gossip, not headlines.
So without any real standards, anyone has a right to declare himself or herself a journalist. Major media outlets also encourage it. Citizen journalism allows them to involve audiences, and it is a free source of information and video. But it is also ripe for abuse.
CNN's last YouTube Republican debate included a question from a retired general who is on Hillary Clinton's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender steering committee. False Internet rumors about Sen. Barack Obama attending a radical Muslim school became so widespread that CNN and other news agencies did stories debunking the rumors. There are literally hundreds of Internet hoaxes and false reports passed off as true stories, tracked by sites such as snopes.com.
Hoaxes and gullible people existed well before the Internet. Ever hear of Piltdown Man, the Loch Ness Monster, or receive a chain letter?
Hazinski obviously didn't get the memo that the professionals at CNN failed to vet General Keith Kerr to see if he had any political affiliations (or ignored the results of said vetting) not only before they used his YouTube question on air, but also before they paid to have him fly out, set him up in a hotel, and seated him strategically in the audience and gave him more microphone time than some of the candidates -- and for what? To make the Republican candidates look as though they hate gays? That was the impression I got. Seeing Bill Bennett inform Anderson Cooper of Kerr's Clinton campaign association live, on-air, was one of the sweetest moments in recent television history.
There are so many other "professional" journalism scandals I could list: CNN's Eason Jordan admitting they softened the news coming out of Iraq so Saddam Hussein wouldn't kick them out of Baghdad; Jayson Blair's fake reporting for the New York Times; Dan Rather's "fake but accurate" TANG documents; enhanced and/or fake photos by the likes of Reuters (dubbed "fauxtography" in the blogosphere)...need I go on?
Just as hoaxes and gullible people existed before the Internet, so did unscrupulous news reporters.
Glenn Reynolds, Bryan Preston, Chuck Simmins and Bill Quick have all given this topic the once over; head over to their sites to see what they have to say.
I would like to close with this:
Neither Thomas Paine nor Benjamin Franklin were "professional journalists." And they did a heck of a lot more for our country than people the likes of Walter Cronkite, Chris Matthews, Dan Rather -- or David Hazinksi ever will.
Show Comments »
Internet hoaxes only fool people who read the internet, and not many of them. The problem with citizen journalism is that it limits the amount of money that can go into research, and the access that the corporate media has to the centers of power.
There are many advantages too, primarily the divesity of voices contesting an ever smaller number of major media outlets. I remember a Nation cover that was concerned with the no. going down to ten or twelve, never mind the five we have now.
The free market will establish an equilibrium between the new and old media eventually. Newspapers we're objective sources of information for the first hundred or so years they existed, from the days when they were ad sheets, political party propaganda outlets in the early days of the republic, and sensationalist rags at the turn of the century. One reason I laugh when I hear accusations of media bias from the right is that, comparitively, the media is more even-handed than it has been at any time in history.
Posted by: paul at December 14, 2007 07:28 PMGee...it was a citizen journalists who exposed Rathergate, Fauxtography and a few others.
Posted by: John Ruberry at December 14, 2007 08:20 PMSmall wonder that an MSM elitist like Hazinski should want the henhouse regulated by foxes.
Posted by: Van Helsing at December 17, 2007 10:39 PM
