Here's an excerpt from my article responding to a recent article in the New Yorker about the state of the media and the role that can be played by citizen journalism. It would be good see serious discussion of the issues raised. Ronda BechtelThe money system we have today is called the debt-money system. It is corrupt and needs to be replaced. The only way money comes into existence... Response to Nicholas Lemann's New Yorker article on "citizen journalism" In his recent article, "Journalism Without Journalists," published in The New Yorker on Aug 7, Nicholas Lemann challenges the promise and practice of citizen journalism. (1) Lemann is on the staff of The New Yorker, a magazine that publishes important investigative journalism. He is also the Dean of the Columbia University Journalism School, one of the most prominent schools of journalism in the United States. Given these credentials one might expect that an article by Lemann in the The New Yorker would offer a serious examination of the new phenomenon of citizen journalism, and a consideration of the role it can play in the media. Unfortunately Lemann does not set out to do either of these two pieces of much needed work..... Lemann recognizes that OhmyNews is "perhaps the biggest citizen-journalism site" and that it is based in Seoul, Korea. He gives no indication, however, of familiarity with the important achievements of OhmyNews. "What has citizen journalism actually brought us?", he asks disparagingly, ignoring the fact that OhmyNews and citizen reporters publishing in OhmyNews helped to elect an unknown politician to the presidency of South Korea. Nor does he seem to know that a citizen reporter posting on OhmyNews to honor two middle school girls end by an armored tank driven by two U.S. soldiers, helped to ignite large candlelight demonstrations against the problem of the unequal U.S.-Korean relationship. There are other significant examples of achievements by citizen reporters which Lemann could learn about if he were interested. Then he would be in a position to make an informed buttessment of the potential and achievements of citizen journalism. Instead, his case against citizen journalism rests on three arbitrary examples of articles taken from three different sites on a particular day in June. The selection mechanism used to choose the sample articles appears to be his effort to claim that citizen journalism is equivalent to what would in other times have appeared in a "church or community newsletter." Lemann doesn't provide the reader of his article in The New Yorker with any means to understand the origins of citizen journalism, as in the context of the creation of the Korean edition of OhmyNews, or the media reform movement called the Anti-Chosun Daily Movement that it was part of.
|
