Citizen Media and Civil Liberties

Citizen Journalists are our best hope for countering the biases and neglect of news and opinion by Mainstream Media (MSM)

Citizen Media and Civil Liberties
Initially written, October 31, 2008



Introduction

Citizen media, or citizen journalism, as it is alternatively sometimes called, is news or public opinion that is being generated by lay citizens rather than by professional writers and journalists. It has come to be an antidote for the narrowness and seeming bias of Mainstream Media (MSM). Many of us who have been concerned that the values written in to the social contract, as embodied in the Preamble to our Constitution, have been seriously undermined by omissions and commissions of “Mainstream Media”. Because of its very large role as a major influence on our Society, media as a whole has been sometimes dubbed as the Fourth Estate, almost like a fourth branch of government. Esteem for the Fourth Estate in our society has always been quite high. As a people, we have prized our “Free Press”. But far from educating the public in a fair and honest way, Mainstream Media seems to be more at the beck and call of special interests in our country, related to privilege, celebrity, class, ownership, profit and wealth. Conglomerate owned media is at an apex in our country. The consolidation of such media has been accelerated in the last eight years under the Bush Administration. The public awareness that something was amiss in the coverage of news seems to have been heightened by the election of 2000, when grumblings about unrecorded and hanging chads began to be voiced by the Public at Large.

Many simply didn’t buy that the whole story of the 2000 election had been told fully. After the Supreme Court intervention in that election, the Press folded like puppies in a cage, all meek and ready for the January Inauguration (or coronation) to come! All meekly accepting the “results”of an election, as if it had been fought fairly and squarely, hanging chads, be damned! And the puppies pretty much have stayed in their cage ever since.

When the run-up to the War in Iraq was being advanced by the Bush Administration, MSM was either primarily silent or supportive - and certainly not asking the Administration the hard questions that needed to be asked.

When detentions, renditions, and wiretapping on citizens were being perpetrated, MSM rarely made them the front page stories they rightly should have been, considering that such actions were so contradictory under our system of government, as we citizens know it from our most basic civics education, pertaining to laws about human and civil rights. But where was the media outcry or basic coverage about such untoward, seemingly unconstitutional, behavior on the part of the Bush Administration. Few questions were asked and few demands for accountability were made from MSM editorial/opinion writers.

The election of 2004 heightened the alarm many of us had already been feeling about the state of press coverage in America, to the detriment of our democracy. The infamous swift-boat attack on the credentials of John Kerry was magnified enormously by MSM. When the final “results” of the election were actually tallied, there appeared to be nothing “free” about the Press any longer. It was clear to many how cautious and biased, the Press had actually become. Once again, the press chose to accept carte blanche, the “official results” of the election, despite stories of voter disenfranchisements, apparent statistical discrepancies and anomalies, unfair access to voting machines, and the radically different exit poll figures, from vote “tallies”. But such stories were never pursued in the Press. What we got was zilch. It was a dead issue, in this land of Democracy, at the height of when we were on an imperial march to establish democracy in Iraq! Confidence in the accuracy and fairness of the press was eroded still further.

There was only one exception to the lack of coverage of those questionable election results, and it was that which derived from the Internet, primarily by citizens fed up with the state of our Press and news coverage. On the internet, the story was available to all to pursue and discuss. We joined Yahoo and Google groups to lament the situation and we exchanged information about the state of our Democracy. We collected the information and shared it all around. The story of electoral process problems was being by told by Citizens and communicated from one citizen to the next. The story was there to tell and tell it we did, and I did! See Passionate Progressive Patriot. Electoral Reform by Karita Hummer http://passionateprogressivepatriot.blogspot.com/2007/11/electoral-reform.html We didn’t think this was an American story that the country could afford to have go untold or to be forgotten.

As our lament about this electoral injustice rose in our writing, it seemed to stimulate all kinds of citizen disgruntlement, and many of us began to write almost non-stop about a number of issues. There were so many injustices we discovered that were going unreported or under- reported. Some of us began to focus on key inequities such as inequality in criminal justice, global warming, homelessness, poverty, unbridled power grabs by the Executive Branch of Government and seemingly, creeping authoritarianism in our government, pre-emptive war, lack of health care for all, special interest and influence in government, and the vacuousness of media, itself, to name just a few of the concerns, being raised and discussed by citizens. Our stories, commentaries and opinion pieces revealed a collective angst about the state of the Nation, and always a sense that we were called to do something about it.

I can recall a time in our country, when the media really was not as vacuous as it is now. In the 1960’s, there was almost daily coverage of poverty conditions and hunger in places like Appalachia, the inner city and other parts of America, which had been left behind. Why did these stories in MSM dry up? Fortunately, like latter day Boston Tea Party goers or Paul Reveres, we refused to be complacent about the really big issues of our time and especially about the sense that our very democracy was eroding beneath our feet. Citizens are coming to the rescue and sounding the alarm – through citizen journalism.

Current State of Citizen Media Today.
There really are numerous examples of Citizen Media today and most of them are concentrated on the Internet, because the computer and Web 2.0 have given ordinary citizens the tools at their disposal to publish their news and opinion in many interactive venues. Penn State University has a glossary up on the topic of Web 2.0, and at that site, which they call Penn State Learning Design Community Hub, Web 2.0 is defined this way: Web 2.0 - A term to generally describe web sites and services where the content is shaped partially or entirely by the users (instead of being read-only and published by a sponsoring company). Authors at Penn State Learning Design Community Hub http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/learningdesign/

But old fashioned newsletters still qualify as examples of Citizen media, as are Letters to the Editor. In fact, interestingly, as Consolidated Corporate Media cuts back on their papers’ editorial pages, as recently seems to have happened under McClatchy Newspapers at the San Jose Mercury News, the Letters to the Editor are becoming more prominent and appear to be being read a lot more than ever before, and cited by the general public. In the last year, for example, I have had the good fortune to have had almost all the letters I have written to the Editor of the local San Jose Mercury News published. I hear from numerous people that my letters have been noticed and read.

On the Internet, itself, social network sites like Facebook and My Space provide an immediate forum for members to communicate and exchange ideas, and opinions, as well as to promote causes. Some Dot.Com companies like Google and Yahoo have enabled people, such as me, to create their own blog sites, as I have done with my own blog, Passionate Progressive Patriots through Google Blogspot service. http://passionateprogressivepatriot.blogspot.com/
Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Digg, my DD, Democrats.com, Democrats Underground, Velvet Revolution, Brad’s Blog are especially popular sites for Progressives, so, admittedly, those are the blogs I know best. Daily Kos and Huffington Post are the gold standard for Progressive blogs. Newer blogs, like Progressive Blue Blog, have been created by a community of users who tired of the unruly company at some of the blogs and found they had more in common and shared interests and purpose with some more than others. In the case of EENR (later named Progressive Blue, most of the community there were supporters of one of the presidential candidates, John Edwards, and had often written about the issues of that campaign on Daily Kos, on such topics as economic justice, energy conservation and alternative energy, manufacturing and fair trade, participatory democracy, party transformation and other topics. When they created their own site, they set up strict rules for civil discourse and fair, respectful dialogue, which they felt they were not being accorded properly at other sites, such as that of Daily KOS.
Parallel with the growth of citizen media has been the exponential growth of alternative media and the outcry for media reform. Many citizen journalists are devoted to alternative media and receive much inspiration from it, such as from republished pieces in Common Dreams, Free Press, Democracy NOW, and Truthout.

Wikipedia has devoted a whole section of their site now to the topic of Citizen Media. In fact, they have two sections, one called Citizen Media and one called, Citizen Journalism.

· Wikipedia defines Citizen Media this way: “The term citizen media refers to forms of content produced by private citizens who are otherwise not professional journalists. Citizen journalism, participatory media and democratic media are related principles.” “Citizen Media” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_media. in their section on Citizen Media, they cover the following topics: Principles of citizen media and Modes of citizen media , including Radio, Television, Internet and Video
According to Wikipedia, Citizen Media or Citizen journalism is now becoming a subject of literary discourse, with whole books being published on the subject (e.g. We the Media (Dan Gillmor) and The Wealth of Networks (Y. Benkler) Both of these books are said to have focused on the topic of participatory citizenship.

In Wikipedia’s separate section on Citizen Journalism, Citizen journalism is described as the process or the collecting of information by citizens (as I am doing here for this piece.). It is the act of conducting citizen media. Citizen journalism, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism
The phenomenon of Citizen Media is not limited to the US. Wikipedia gives examples of Citizen Media occurring worldwide. For example, one outlet, OhmyNews, in Korea, describes itself as the first one of its kind, an online newspaper with the motto "Every Citizen is a Reporter". It was founded by Oh Yeon Ho on February 22, 2000. Source, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism and, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OhmyNews
Rights and Responsibilities
Rights
There are both rights and responsibilities about which advocates for Citizen Media must be aware. Freedom of speech, Press and Assembly, and even that of petititon, as protected in the first Amendment to the Constitution, is the bedrock on which the Citizen Media movement stands. It stands on the very tradition of colonial citizens in support of our Revolution who took to using pamphlets to express their disgruntlement with the King of England. It is at once a Civil Liberties issue and a Civil Rights issue.

In introducing first Amendment Language in to Congress in 1789, Madison said, (p/1 0f 5, Find Law http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment01/06.html#1) “The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write or to publish their sentiments”.

Justice Brennan affirmed such sentiment in the Tinker vs. Des Moines School District case when he state the need for a “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues, should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” (Peck, Robert S., Constitutional Protection, under Publication, Unfettered Press http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/press/press02.htm
The First amendment with regard to the expression of opinion has been tested and affirmed in the Courts numerous times. These affirmations were an echo of Andrew Hamilton of many years earlier who as an attorney in defense of one John Peter Zenger, a printer, charged with seditious libel, said, “..."The Question before the Court and you, Gentlemen of the Jury, is not of small nor private Concern, it is not the Cause of a poor Printer, nor of New York alone, which you are now trying: No!.... It is the best Cause. It is the Cause of Liberty."! Andrew Hamilton, from Peck, Robert S., Constitutional Protection, under Publication, Unfettered Press http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/press/press02.htm
Andrew Hamilton was ultimately successful in the defense of John Peter Zenger in 1735, and it became the cornerstone of future court cases regarding Freedom of the Press. Peck, Robert S., Constitutional Protection, under Publication, Unfettered Press http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/press/press02.htm

Ethics and Responsibilities
With rights always come responsibilities. With all the criticism we citizen bloggers have leveled at Mainstream Media, it behooves us, as citizen journalists, to establish and adhere to a set of ethics that ensures that we don’t repeat the same old unprincipled behavior we have suffered of late at the hands of greatly consolidated Mainstream Media. In other words, what we expect of MSM, we should demand of ourselves. We have a litany of complaints, so let’s not compound the problem by repeating the mistakes that have so undermined our access to information. Fortunately, there have been citizen media advocates who have put a lot of thought in to guiding would-be citizen bloggers. Dan Gillmor, Founder and Director of the Center for Citizen Media, formerly Technology Writer for the San Jose Mercury News, and one of the most renowned citizen media advocates, clearly advances one set of ethics to guide any kind of media. On his private web-site, Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc., Gilmor discusses ethics quite succinctly, quoting a fellow blogger, Len Witt, with the admonition, "Don't lie. Don't sell out." , adding, himself, this statement, “I tend to bring it down to this even tinier admonition: Be honorable. Period.” Well-said and pretty clear. http://dangillmor.typepad.com/dan_gillmor_on_grassroots/2005/05/journalistic_et.html
The Knight Citizen News Network is another place that encourages, educates and guides citizen journalists in the ethical practice of citizen journalism. This site stresses six basic principles to follow:
1. “Accuracy
2. Thoroughness
3. Fairness
4. Transparency
5. Independence
6. Resources” (as in proper researching)
http://www.kcnn.org/principles/
The site is a great resource to Citizen Bloggers, as they back up each of these principles with information and education in order to help such bloggers become really capable of applying these principles to their writing.. As the Knight Citizens News Network suggests on their page about principles, it is only in the adherence to such principles that Citizen Journalism will achieve “trust and credibility”.






Summary
The fourth Estate, i.e., Mainstream Media, has utterly failed our democracy. There is little free press around these days, as they are so controlled by Corporate conglomerates. The Press serves the Plutocracy today. In recent years, we suffered through a degrading and demoralizing eight years under the Bush Administration, while the Press did precious little in giving the citizenry information on which to go to reign in the worst of the Administration's excesses. The Press gave Bush and his company of Pretenders a free pass, from the "selection" by the Supreme Court, through all the other electoral atrocities and thefts in the last eight years, through Constitutional Law violations. You name it, Press criticism has been muted at best. It especially thrives on providing entertainment as news, perhaps because it sells. Perhaps Citizen Media can finally become enough of a challenge to MSM that the fourth Estate will find their truly serious purpose once again. Until then, if it ever comes, we need Citizen Media to balance the pool of information and persuasion open to citizens.