Gina sent me a Crooks and Liars link this morning to Dogged Media God Keith Olbermann's blistering smackdown of Donald Rumsfeld's propaganda spew speech to the American Legion yesterday. It was brilliant and Murrowesque and intelligent and dazzling and you know the kind of thing it was: Genius.
And it got me thinking about journalism and my days as a j-school student, all wide-eyed and "All The Presidents' Men" and excited about changing the world. Like, you know, Keith Olbermann and .... then it hit me. The next name on that list was going to be JON STEWART. Who, as he keeps assuring us, does FAKE news. Because fake media like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and bloggers/citizen journalists like John Aravosis and Markos, have done more to goose the mainstream media into acting like actual journalists than anything else. They've broken stories, asked hard questions, and done investigative work no one else would do, raising the bar on professional journalists and turning up the heat while they were at it. Which the idealistic j-school student in me loves.
And that reminded me of this rant from columnist Simon Dumenco wherein he sees some link between crazed fans of his semi-famous boyfriend taking their photos with camera phones in a cafe, and the end of the world as we know it destruction of real journalism by "citizen journalists."
I have no problem with the equivalency he makes between slimy professional paparazzi and the "citizen paparazzi" who stalk his boyfriend. I know that fans can be scary people, and I even know some freaky stories about fans stalking his boyfriend. (Although that fan video of said boyfriend doing drunken karaoke in Stockbridge is priceless. I'm just saying.)
I just think trying to extrapolate that out to citizen vs professional investigative journalism - or even legitimate entertainment journalism - is way off base.
Dumenco first acknowledges that citizen journalists have raised the bar for professional journalists in some ways, and cites the London tube bombing as one example where the footage obtained with cell phone cameras "bettered" the media - albeit, he says, "momentarily." He goes on, though, to say that "citizen journalists" are putting themselves in harm's way to obtain such coverage, which is true enough but really, no different from any journalist who chooses to put herself in harm's way for a story or photo. Then he writes:
(M)y larger concern is with the way that citizen journalism—and wannabe journalism—erodes the market for professional journalism. If 2005 was a signal year for the emergence of the cell phone as a newsgathering tool, it was also the year that presaged the death of newspapers and the further rapid contraction of traditional newsgathering operations.
He totally lost me there.
He thinks 2005 was the year that presaged the death of newspapers and the contraction of newsgathering operations? Where the fuck has he been for the last decade?
As to eroding the market for professional journalism, well, if some college student with a camera phone does a better job than a pro, that's to the shame of the pro, and not something the pro should be trying to stop. The pro should, instead, try to be better.
And that applies to both political journalism and to entertainment media. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, cell phone cameras will be with us always, as will blogs, Gawker, and MySpace. The professional media will just have to suck it up and work harder.
Or quit their jobs and get a LiveJournal.
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