The video showing the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police sparked the Black Lives Matter protests and became one of the biggest new stories of the year. But the video wasn’t taken by a journalist or put online by a traditional media outlet, and it wasn’t vetted by anyone. Seventeen year old Darnella Frazier shot it on her cellphone, then posted it on Facebook and of course it went viral, just as she had hoped. “My video went worldwide for everyone to see and know,” she later said on Facebook. She didn’t want the police to be able to sweep it under the rug. This is a powerful example of what’s known as Citizen Journalism, where someone who isn’t a professional journalist distributes information - words, pictures or video - outside of the mainstream media. Frazier was able to share it with the world, instantly, on her own terms.
cellphone and an internet connection. Media critic and NYU professor Jay Rosen defines
citizen journalism as “what happens when the people formerly known as the audience employ
the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another.” (bloomberg.com,
1/31/2018). Another word for Citizen Journalism is Participatory Journalism, meaning that
instead of sitting back and being passive consumers of news, we can also voice our opinions
and create and share content with each other. That doesn’t mean citizen journalists get paid or even know if anyone will see their reports, but at least they can try and get their voices heard. Of course, not everyone thinks that’s a good thing, since professional journalists are trained reporters who are taught to follow certain journalistic rules and ethics, including fact checking and lack of bias (not sure that’s working out too well, Fox News). Plus, their work is generally overseen by editors who exercise quality control, at least in countries with a free press.
Where Citizen Journalism has proven to be crucial is in the many countries where the the government controls the media and true information is difficult to get. In a recent example, the Chinese government was hiding the seriousness of the coronavirus from even its own people. When a young Chinese doctor, Li Wenliang, blew the whistle on the seriousness of the coronavirus that was spreading in China, he was taken to a police station and forced to sign a statement admitting he had spread false rumors. But by then his message had already circulated on the internet. Li Wenliang died from the coronavirus in February, 2020. He was known as a hero, and other Citizen Journalists were reporting from hospitals, getting photos of the dead and dying, as well as reports from other doctors and victims’ families. Without the
citizen journalists, the world wouldn’t have been warned about the virus until later and more
people would have died.
Citizen Journalists have been the most credible journalists reporting from Syria, since 2011 when the people’s uprising began against their brutal President Bashar al-Assad. The government has tight control over the media, and all foreign journalists were kicked out of the country. Citizens, who wanted the world to know about how Assad was killing the people, have been posting videos of bodies hit by rockets from the Syrian army, and reporting on chemical weapon attacks on the people. Eight year-old Bana Alabed tweeted about the war, bringing international attention to the country. She escaped, but some of the citizen journalists still there have become professional journalists, working undercover sending reports to the foreign press who cannot get into the country. That raises the question - is there really a big difference between paid journalists and citizen journalists?
The answer probably comes down to the individual person. Take the case of Eric Tucker, from Austin, Texas. In 2016, on a day there was supposed to be an anti-Trump rally, he took a picture of buses coming into town filled with people and assumed they paid protestors going to the rally. He tweeted his 40 followers about #fakeprotestors. He had no idea that his tweet would go viral and be shared 350,0000 times on Facebook, for example, and by that night President Trump saw it and tweeted: “Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting! Very unfair!’Tucker hadn’t meant to spread fake news, but that’s what happened, and it happened fast. He’d made an assumption and he hadn’t checked it out. Fake news is definitely a problem, and it’s more of a problem with citizen journalists, who can say what they want on the internet and no one is checking their facts. But on the positive side, people don’t need to have jobs at media outlets to get their voices heard. That is important in places without mainstream media, and not just overseas. Paid journalists have been losing their jobs as media companies shrink. Especially hard hit are local media outlets in small towns and rural areas. All across America, local news sites have closed and the people who live there don’t know what’s happening in their own towns. In some places, citizen journalists have started reporting local news. I think that’s a good thing, especially if they report truthfully. But like it or not, citizen journalism is here to stay, and it’s protected by the Constitution. The first amendment doesn’t say “freedom of speech for the professional press,”It’s freedom of speech for everybody.
Pictures:
https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/22/middleeast/bana-aleppo-twitter-syria-turkey/index.html
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/photojournalism/power-people
Videos:
https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/22/middleeast/bana-aleppo-twitter-syria-turkey/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/world/asia/chinese-doctor-Li-Wenliang-coronavirus.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/business/media/how-fake-news-spreads.html?_r=0
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/syria-journalism-jobs.php
http://sn4hr.org/blog/2020/05/03/54947/
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/photojournalism/power-people
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