David Hazinski, who is apparently a professor at the University of Georgia’s School of Journalism, has a column in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution telling us all how bad it is that information is no longer in the hands of the media elite:
The premise of citizen journalism is that regular people can now collect information and pictures with video cameras and cellphones, and distribute words and images over the Internet. Advocates argue that the acts of collecting and distributing makes these people “journalists.” This is like saying someone who carries a scalpel is a “citizen surgeon” or someone who can read a law book is a “citizen lawyer.” Tools are merely that. Education, skill and standards are really what make people into trusted professionals. Information without journalistic standards is called gossip.
But unlike those other professions, journalism — at least in the United States — has never adopted uniform self-regulating standards. There are commonly accepted ethical principals — two source confirmation of controversial information or the balanced reporting of both sides of a story, for example, but adhering to the principals is voluntary. There is no licensing, testing, mandatory education or boards of review. Most other professions do a poor job of self-regulation, but at least they have mechanisms to regulate themselves. Journalists do not.
So without any real standards, anyone has a right to declare himself or herself a journalist. Major media outlets also encourage it. Citizen journalism allows them to involve audiences, and it is a free source of information and video. But it is also ripe for abuse.
You mean abuses like manufacturing false allegations against a Presidential candidate, falsely and irresponsibly accusing an innocent man of murder, or faking vehicle explosions in a so-called investigative report ?
As you might expect, the blogosphere has responded fairly furiously to Hazinski’s column. Over at QandO, Billy Hollis does a thoroughly effective fisking of the good Professor:
Mr Hazinski, you guys in the mainstream media are in deep, deep trouble. The whole world is changing around you, and you can’t keep up. We are in the information age, and there is literally no way short of dictatorship to suppress information flow in today’s world. All you would do with your “standards” is impose more costs on your own organizations that are stupid enough to buy into de facto censorship, while the new media will ignore such nonsense and go on making you ever more irrelevant.
At Captain’s Quarter’s, Ed Morrissey detects elitism in Hazinski’s call for standards:
No one should need a guild membership to speak their mind. The First Amendment, which protected Hazinski throughout his entire career, does not include a provision that says free speech should only apply to those in the Journalist Union. Hazinski wants to recreate the barriers to publication that existed before the Internet in order to protect himself, not to protect consumers from gossip. People are smart enough to find the truth, which is why the First Amendment exists in the first place.
That’s the thing about people like Hazinski. They don’t think that the average newspaper reader really is smart enough to uncover the truth on their own, which is why they need journalists to tell them what the truth is. Thankfully, those days are over.
Finally, Mark at Publius Endures picks up the First Amendment theme and runs with it:
In essence, Hazinski wishes to rewrite the First Amendment so that “freedom of the press” applies only to people who the state and/or large news organizations deem to be worthy of being called “the press.” He also would rewrite that essential foundation of the American ideal so that “freedom of speech” is defined as “freedom of speech outside of media outlets of mass dissemination.”
And I’m betting he’s not the only “journalist” who would like to do that.
