Citizen Journalists Operate in the Media Space

Today, it is easier than ever to engage in the media ‘authorship’. All you need is a mobile phone with a camera, a computer with an internet connection, and a brain or basic knowledge of the profession is entirely optional.

writes Vanja Figenwald
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Casually walking into an operating room in the middle of a surgical procedure, pushing the surgeon aside and taking the scalpel, all without any qualifications, respect for protocols, and the demands of the profession would at the very least be considered complete idiocy, and in a worse scenario, an incurable patient who should no longer be allowed among people. Fortunately for the person on the table, this rarely happens. At least in medicine. However, this rule has recently applied to fewer and fewer professions. They stubbornly hold on mainly to those in the natural and technical fields, where a lack of professionalism can often lead to death, but in the case of social sciences and humanities, all barriers have disappeared. One of the extreme forms of such a breakdown of values popular in recent years is the concept of citizen journalism. A somewhat more official definition states that it is a person who is not a professional journalist but actively participates in the search, creation, analysis, and distribution of news. This is a trend that fits perfectly into the ongoing attempts at extreme democratization of society.

Wrong Bloggers
A less official definition, however, states that it often refers to the infamous bloggers who have decided to give the impression of seriousness and relevance to their mostly disconnected and nonsensical ramblings by acquiring the title of journalist. Another variation, even sadder, are ‘en passant’ citizen journalists who find themselves in the middle of events and decide to ‘report’ on them. The genesis of this last in a series of ‘ultra-democratic’ trends aimed at creating the illusion of ordinary people’s participation in decision-making is relatively simple and is the result of the actions of the holy trinity of modern capitalism – marketing, politics, and media.

Marketing wants money, politics wants votes, and media wants attention from the ordinary person who therefore does not have to be smart, talented, educated, charming, informed, or important in the broader scheme of things for these three to continuously worm their way into their lives and convince them that they are all those wonderful things they are not. So why, for example, would a mechanic not try his hand at journalism? It seems to me that I would do quite well. I will write a blog. Not that interesting blogs that intrigue with offered thoughts, art, or something else cannot be found, but they are a very rare occurrence in an ocean of pure garbage. And, really, today it is easier than ever. All you need is a mobile phone with a camera, a computer with an internet connection, and a brain or basic knowledge of the profession is entirely optional. In fact, it is superfluous.

Cradle in America
This entire system – fact-checking, learning how news or text is made, responsibility, and a clear hierarchy that exists in every more serious editorial office – actually only hinders the ordinary person in their personal quest for truth and authenticity. In the uncontrolled flourishing of technology, one of the most important tenets of democracy, perhaps the most important – responsibility – has been completely forgotten. Whatever someone thinks about the standards of classical journalism, which have, to be honest, fallen just like in a number of other professions, in it, a name and surname stand behind every written word, as well as a complete editorial hierarchy. Anonymity is one of the key weapons of the new digital age, and where there is anonymity, there is no talk of responsibility. The general degradation of qualifications or even more endangered types, real talent, has thus joined citizen journalism, in which not only some basic laws of the profession are neglected but also market and social laws. Everyone in this society is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for them and how attractive they are to the audience (both are, however, increasingly miserable criteria of quality, which has become its antithesis).

It is therefore easier to simply bypass those criteria and engage in something without even ranking among people, passing through the sieve and colander of usual social and professional initiations and trying to measure your worth against your equals. It is easier to ramble aimlessly, spread gossip and half-truths, as in the case of the supposed heart attack of Steve Jobs that was published in CNN’s citizen journalism section, or just casually engage in something that interests you. But superficiality is anyway the new god of mass (dis)taste.

The idea is relatively new, and strangely enough, it appeared in America, where the people need the illusion of importance a bit more than in other democracies because they really do not have it. It appeared around the 1980s as a reaction to the erosion of trust in traditional journalism, trapped in advertising and corporate claws. However, it makes no sense to hate the player, but the game. The media did not invent the system, and even today, disgruntled citizens are not that interested in the survival of independent journalism to adequately pay for it. The decline of all media trying to do so clearly proves this. Readers can no longer sustain themselves, no matter how good they are. Moreover, the better you are, the less chance you have. After all, why would you even pay – in an age of free content that marketing provides?

Journalist or Clerk
The next thing that has become commonplace is the perception of journalism exclusively as an investigative activity in which the journalist deeply dives into the great secrets of the system and reveals them. First, investigative journalism has long ceased to be what it was and has long been just a euphemism for serving someone’s very concrete interests, with the help of topics that journalists supposedly discovered, although often the information is served on a platter or transferred from interests that are anything but public good and the desire for correct information. Second, investigative journalism is not the only journalism. Someone needs to report the news every day, investigate topics interesting to the audience, offer analyses and context to events, comment, educate, speculate… Journalism is not synonymous with uncovering scandals and sensations.

It is precisely in accordance with such an understanding of journalism that the idea has developed that only a person who happened to be somewhere and recorded an event is a journalist and has the right to consider themselves one, but this is a very unserious trivialization of the profession and what is involved in it. Journalism includes a range of tasks of which commenting or photographing something is only a part, not the whole.  

David Simon, a former journalist and screenwriter of the series ‘The Wire’, expressed himself on the issue of citizen journalism as follows: – Indeed, the very phrase ‘citizen journalism’ sounds somewhat Orwellian to me. A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is simply a good neighbor, he is not a citizen social worker. Just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say such a thing is a blatant insult to qualified social workers and firefighters.

Failing to report something, reporting tendentiously, not fact-checking, lying and disinforming, etc., regularly appear in journalism, but that is why it is clearly regulated within the profession, always with a clearly divided line of responsibility, just like in most professions where there is a system, sometimes better, sometimes worse, whose ultimate goal is to try to bring the most capable to the forefront and push out the rotten apples. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes it does not, but it is necessary. Otherwise, the patient from the beginning of the text could one day find themselves with a citizen surgeon.