Traditional vs. Citizen Media – It’s Social Darwinism in Action

I’ve been really annoyed by journalists repeatedly claiming they have ethics that bloggers don’t. Do they have any idea how hard it is to get a CORRECTION OF FACT if you don’t have a lawyer or a PR person behind you? Journalists have been undermining the ethics of their own field in recent years: they do this when they let corporations buy content placed as “news”, they do this when they splice interview responses with new questions in order to create a more interesting or sensational story, and they do this everytime they decline to write the story of a nobody because they think the public won’t care.

There are many sorts of bloggers, but the main difference between the credible ones and the ignored ones is recognition from the mainstream media and other high profile bloggers. This is a social gesture – it has nothing to do with accuracy or truth. Two bloggers can write the exact same opinion piece: only the one who gets links and acknowledgement from the bloggers who have “made it” will be viewed as citizen journalists. If the bloggers who have made it decide to condemn you for “bias” or “tinfoil hattery” or any other way of discrediting someone’s opinion – then your blog isn’t seen as journalism. Instead you become one of those “dangerous bloggers” that the mainstream media likes to beat down on.

Again – the content can be exactly the same. A blog can be professional in every other way: spelling, engaging writing style, clear format. But if the bloggers who have crossed over as citizen journalists want to turn your editorials into mere “biased opinions” (no matter what wealth of documentary evidence you post – in fact you can get in trouble for poor judgment in trying to post the evidence) – then you aren’t a citizen journalist.

As you can tell, I currently don’t think much of citizen journalists. It’s not because I think they have less credibility than mainstream media. It’s because they are real jerks about picking and choosing who to bring along with them.

First, in response to “anonymous,” he or she is right to be annoyed by the claim of many journalists that they are inherently more ethical. Like any community — of bloggers or journalists — there are those that are ethical and those that are not. Prior to p.r. work, I was a journalist for 18 years and I can tell you there are definitely unethical journalists out there.

But, aside from the vast majority of my former colleagues, who I did find fundamentally ethical (even if most can sometimes be so sanctimous as to overlook their shortcomings, a failing we all share as humans), there is something institutional that does help to keep more of them from being unethical. That is a professional code of behavior that was built up with great effort over time and while the last few years of mainstream media history might seem to suggest otherwise, it has generally served to keep more of those who might be inclined to tray within certain ethical bounds.

Which takes me to Brian’s original post and the conclusion he draws that “the most important gem here is that, at some point “traditional” journalists will become extinct. They, and the publications they represent, will evolve.”

What if the most important gem is really that — like the political pamphleteers who proceded modern journalism — the bloggers will evolve? That the peer-to-peer blogger community will itself begin to impose codes of acceptable peer behavior and online conduct that will eventually give the citizen journalism of blogging more of an institutional feel.

The purists would scream “sell-out” and decry this as co-optation, but history has shown that this is what happened to evolve the original pamphleteering citizen journalism into today’s mainstream media. We communicators all work within an open, market society and the market, over time, has a tendency to take the revolutionary new forms of expression and make them mainstream and institutional. My guess is that blogging will evolve and come to more closely resemble mainstream journalism than most prognosticators would toay be willing to predict.