By any measure American journalism is in a state of crisis. Media scams and scandals abound, embroiling journalists and their news outlets — from Jayson Blair and The New York Times to Dan Rather and CBS News — in controversy. Plagiarism, errors and outright hoaxes proliferate, along with corrections, extensive “Editor’s Notes” and eventual apologies. Partisan political operatives masquerade as credible news agents, disseminating fake news produced by phony journalists. Columnists and commentators accept government and corporate money to shill ideas without disclosing it to their audiences. Government-produced propaganda is presented as objective reportage.
No wonder journalists rank near the bottom of every poll measuring the trustworthiness of American institutions. No wonder many high-school students believe the First Amendment goes too far and the government should approve articles before publication. No wonder the vast majority of media consumers (and a growing number of media makers) are profoundly dissatisfied with mainstream journalism and in a deep funk over its future.
Although such a parlous state of affairs is not the plight of American media alone, in recent months the backlash has been seen here more than anywhere, and a rapidly burgeoning media reform movement is afoot. The American media are under growing scrutiny. Advances in digital technology are rapidly revolutionizing modern media, spawning unparalleled interactivity and turning those who were once mere news consumers into independent and increasingly sophisticated news producers. The rise in high-speed Internet connections is fueling an evolution of the Web from a medium heavy on text and graphics into a source of audio and moving pictures, and the proliferation of low-priced digital cameras, camcorders, recording gear and a host of personal electronic devices has created millions of potential journalists. With these tools of production now cheaper, faster and more accessible than ever, the tools of dissemination are becoming more ubiquitous and democratic than ever.
The advent of the “blogosphere” (there are now more than 30 million web logs) offers even more choices and voices, as dissatisfied media citizens increasingly take matters into their own hands to create “citizens’ media.” In the process they are challenging basic assumptions about journalism itself — most importantly the modern shibboleth that “to be a journalist you need to have some special dispensation from some higher power that enables one to stand aside from the human race and cast an ‘objective’ eye over events,” writes blogger and author William Bowles in a recent post on his williambowles.info site.
The phenomenal success of seminal citizen media projects like South Korea’s groundbreaking OhmyNews has inspired a host of new projects. The slogan for the site, launched five years ago by chief executive Oh Yeon-Ho, is simple: “Every citizen is a reporter.” Today OhmyNews posts 150-200 stories a day, attracts millions of daily readers and has tens of thousands of registered citizen journalists. A staff of less than 50 editors and reporters assist in fact-checking and editing, but ordinary citizens — including housewives and elementary students — do most of the reporting and writing.
In America a growing number of citizen-journalists are refugees from the mainstream who have abandoned the media system that once nurtured them. Journalists like Dan Gillmor, until recently a renowned technology writer for the San Jose Mercury-News, and Rebecca McKinnon of CNN have joined the ranks of those seeking a better way of reporting through less hierarchical “distributed information systems.” Gillmor, whose recent book “We The Media” detailed the phenomenon, quit his newspaper column to form Grassroots Media Inc.
Others such as Online Journalism Review columnist J.D. Lasica are trying to take things further. Lasica, whose book “Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation” focuses on the challenges faced by citizen’s media, is one of the creators of Ourmedia.org, which bills itself as “the Global Home for Grassroots Media.” Ourmedia is a “global community and learning center” dedicated to the idea that compelling grassroots endeavors deserve a wider audience. To facilitate that, it promises to host your media forever — everything from “vlogs” (video blogs) to podcasts to documentary journalism to homemade political ads — all for free.
What does it all mean? Simply this: Journalism is again becoming a democratic medium. “No one owns journalism,” blogger/pundit Jeff Jarvis exults on Buzzmachine. “It is not an official act, a certified act, an expert act, a proprietary act. Anyone can do journalism. Everyone does. Some do it better than others, of course. But everyone does it.” And Jacob Weisberg points out on Slate.com, “If you don’t like this raucous clamor emanating from cyberspace, you’re not really comfortable with democracy.”
Discomfiting citizen-powered media is not new, of course. As Bowles points out, “‘Blogs’ have been with us in one form or another for 400 years,” spurred by new technology (the invention of moveable type), which lowered the cost of production (Sound familiar?). The earliest “bloggers” included the likes of revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine, and their voices were so disruptive that sedition laws were passed as a direct response to their ‘self-published’ pamphlets.
It wasn’t until the 20th century, with its emphasis on specialization, that the professionalization of opinion became the norm, and decisions on what constitutes news were ceded to those supposedly in the know. But by the turn of the century, this fading paradigm exploded. Ever-increasing media centralization, with the corporate emphasis on profit, led to a dumbing down of content and the imposition of entertainment values onto the product formerly known as news.
Many dissatisfied consumers now regard what some term the “corporate media” as representing the interests and values of business and governmental entities instead of their own, and journalists as part of an elite with a personal interest in preserving the status quo. And of course, America isn’t the only country facing such challenges. The impetus for OhmyNews, says founder Oh, came from the simple facts that South Korean readers’ “dissatisfaction and distrust with the conventional press had considerably increased, while citizens’ desire to express themselves greatly increased.”
The profession is undergoing a revolution generated from the bottom up, which is turning our world and the world we report on upside down. As the technological tools of the citizen journalism trade become increasingly accessible, the lesson for journalists everywhere is clear: Embrace the change, or else. “They not busy being born are busy dying,” as the poet once wrote. The only choice before us, as Scoop Nisker eloquently phrased it, is this: “If you don’t like the news — make some of your own!”
