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April 1, 2006
Do try this at home...
Samuel Freedman, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, thinks journalism is a professional practice best left to those with proper training (whatever that is) and institutional sanction (i.e. a job at a commercial enterprise). He says on Public Eye:
However wrapped in idealism, citizen journalism forms part of a larger attempt to degrade, even to disenfranchise journalism as practiced by trained professionals. As I said before, I appreciate the access that citizen journalism provides to first-hand accounts of major events. Yet I recognize those accounts are less journalism than the raw material, generated by amateurs, that a trained, skilled journalist should know how to weigh, analyze, describe, and explain.
As a advocate of citizen journalism (I'm trained to do the job professionally and sanctioned to train others to do the job professionally), I cannot find myself in Freedman's generalization about the motives of citizen journalists. Perhaps it would be a good idea to take a careful look at these motives. One might find, for example, that making the invisible visible plays a role. In other words, a community that doesn't see itself in the professionally-produced commercial product might decide it's time to practice journalism to bring its story to the public. This has nothing to do with degrading or disenfranchising commercial journalism. If anything, it is an important contribution that might get the so-called professionals to open their eyes and see the multiplicity of human experience.
Part of what journalism school does is teach students what to see and how to see it. And this necessarily also teaches them what not to see, unless they have a professor (a rhetoric scholar, for example) willing to disrupt this training with a dose of critical discourse analysis and transgressive thinking about professional practice.
Finally, Freedman brings us to the ugly region of professional journalism--arrogance. He delivers this smackdown:
To treat an amateur as equally credible as a professional, to congratulate the wannabe with the title “journalist,” is only to further erode the line between raw material and finished product. For those people who believe that editorial gate-keeping is a form of censorship, if not mind control, then I suppose the absence of any mediating intelligence is considered a good thing.
Wow. So only the professional is credible. But more, only the professional is capable of applying a euphemistic "mediating intelligence."
Who is a journalist? Doug McGill and I hope to answer that question. We've asserted three criteria that we believe are possible to achieve outside the commercial institutions of journalism.
The professional product is important. And it is threatened right now. But that threat comes from many quarters, including from the professional newsroom itself. Rather than disparage citizen journalism, why not help it along? Why not use it to enhance the professional product? For some excellent ideas, I highly recommend reading Tim Porter's essay If Newspapers Are to Rise Again.
UPDATE (4:00 p.m.): NextNews responds to Freedman:
The problem is observers who take an either/or approach when measuring the value of citizen journalism against the MSM. In fact, both are valid. Just ask those news editors who jumped at the chance to show images from London's smoke-filled Tube.
Here's the Rhetorica canon on journalistic arrogance:
Don't know; check...
The A-word...
Teaching arrogance...
The A-word and the L-word...
What role for us in fly-over land?...
The (not so) big enchilada...
More about the A-word...
Them no 'counts...
Yes, it's flawed...
Re-write documents...
Posted by acline at April 1, 2006 11:50 AM | | Spotlight