Citizen Journalism

The director of the journalism program at San Diego’s Point Loma Nazarene University doesn’t make excuses for shoddy journalism.

“Citizen Journalism,” that’s what Dean Nelson calls “the new paparazzi of average citizens” with their cell phone cameras “to put whatever they see on a Web site for all the world to watch.” Nelson lumps them with “bloggers for the information that will help us understand our world and make informed decisions.”

Dean Nelson wonders if citizen journalists have “made the professional journalists obsolete?”

Although not taking potshots at citizen journalists, Nelson feels,

Not in my opinion….The reason we need journalists is for the crucial task of verification….But journalists aren’t always known for going that extra verification mile. We’ve been guilty of publishing or airing or posting things that we believed were true, or wanted to believe were true, or even hoped were true, and did it without getting multiple perspectives. We almost always get caught when we do that, usually by other members of the news media who try to verify what we reported, or by citizen journalists. Our credibility, which is our only commodity, suffers every time it happens…. Journalism is at a crossroads today. Traditional news sources such as newspapers, television and radio are bleeding readers, viewers and listeners. Some of that audience could be reclaimed, I believe, if those news sources strengthened the very thing that separates them from the citizen journalists and focused on verifiable facts.

Our major media, instead, has chosen the road of less verification.

Our MSM has set up instant news desks, usually operating fairly independently, to flash on their websites the latest “news,” even without adequate verification. This is bad enough, but in a warzone where vital American and world interests are at stake, our major media has gone a step beyond to employ untrustworthy or inadequately vetted locals, sometimes with their own agendas.

In an interview I conducted with war correspondent Joe Galloway, published in Editor & Publisher,

Media bureaus in Baghdad now operate largely through inexpensive Iraqi stringers. I asked Galloway how such Iraqis are vetted for reliability. Galloway said that in the case of Knight Ridder, the bureau chief is fluent in Arabic as her primary check.

That rather casual approach to vetting the locals hired by our MSM in Iraq was again recognized in this week’s New York Times article, how the Associated Press’ Bilal Hussein “Case Lays Bare the Media’s Reliance on Iraqi Journalists.”

“A person is usually recommended by another journalist and brought in for an interview, and you sit down and have a long discussion with that person,” said John Daniszewski, The Associated Press’s international editor. “Like any job applicant in the states, people go through a probationary period. They are given lessons, it’s like an apprenticeship relationship.”

Mr. Daniszewski added, “When you are working side by side, you get to know the person, and if the person seems unreliable, or if you ever see someone not completely honest with you, he is out the door.”

The reporters and editors said that they often had to filter out obvious sectarian biases from news copy, and, as a matter of policy, would not run statistics like death counts from the field without official confirmation from the military. But, these journalists emphasized, there is a big difference between bias seeping into news copy and insurgents infiltrating news organizations.

Of course, it’s difficult for the MSM to operate under Iraq’s conditions, as the NYT’s article stresses.

However, due to cheapness by our MSM to field professional journalists (see my E&P column above), due to sloth, and due to biases opposed to the U.S. in the Iraq war, our MSM has not only allowed but defended such locals who distort the news fed to Western audiences, harming morale and support for our mission.

Michelle Malkin has been following the case of the AP’s Bilal Hussein. Jim Hoft, at Gateway Pundit, summed up the seven false massacres the MSM reported in just the past year.

Meanwhile, although our military in Iraq has become better at rebutting false reports in the MSM, the military is bound by a convention that journalists should be, first verifying facts.

Consequently, the rebuttal is often slow in coming, and is either ignored by the MSM or shuttled to tiny type on the back pages, hardly adequate to reverse the false impressions created among readers by the sensationalistic headlines given the false reports from Iraqi stringers.

There is a fairly simple solution. Everyone knows that wars are brutal and that is particularly so in Iraq. It simply isn’t necessary for the MSM to rush into print with poorly founded and verified allegations of brutalities. It's tabloid journalism of the worst sort. The MSM should have higher standards and practices than the National Enquirer.

Not only has the MSM seriously damaged our war effort but it has also seriously damaged its own credibility. Our MSM should work more closely with our military to verify facts, instead of rushing to broadcast enemy propaganda.

If for no other reason than self-interest, if patriotism or professionalism aren’t enough reasons, the MSM must get its own house in order, or see itself continue to fade in audience and respectability.