Citizen journalists lack professional and ethical standards [1]
Monday, June 2, 2008 - 05:24. Updated on Tuesday, July 28, 2015 - 15:32.
Should "citizen journalists" enjoy the same legal rights and privileges as professional journalists?
"No, because professional journalists are trained to do their jobs, and therefore it can be expected of them to carry out their duties with a degree of responsibility as they have certain professional and ethical standards," said Fiji Broadcasting Corporation Ltd chief executive officer Riyaz Sayed-Khaiyum.
He was making a presentation at the two-day Asia Media Summit 2008 on Tuesday to a session on "Changing newsrooms, redefining journalism".
He said that while citizen journalists can make a unique contribution to news gathering, personal bias, emotion, political and religious affiliation will be factored into the reports received by and through them.
If citizen journalism is to be encouraged, journalists must be trained in how to use it as a tool to help crystallise events and information, he said.
"While journalists are encouraged to operate within the boundaries of professionalism, it can be safely assumed that members of the public will be tempted to exaggerate or perform while before the public gaze.
"Therefore, if standards of objectivity, accuracy and truth are to be maintained in the practice of journalism, then citizen journalism and every other development brought our way through advancements in communication, must be weighed against such standards," he said.
The increasing role of citizen journalism brought on by technological advancement will be the challenge for the media industry for much of this century, he said.
In his paper on the "New mediagogy for the oppressed" at the same session, Saed Jamal Abu-Hijleh, director of the Centre for Global Consciousness, Nablus, Palestine, said new advances in information and communication technology are dramatically changing the media landscape.
"Major developments in the electronic media are occurring at an unprecedented rate creating new interconnected platforms that offer wider public participation.
"The internet has been transformed into a multi-layered and interconnected media platform facilitating better flow of information and enhanced sharing of content in different formats.
"The internet developed from a medium that allowed the interaction between one-to-one, then one-to-many and now many-to-many."
Such developments resulted in a massive increase in user-generated content on the internet, like weblogs, newsgroups, mailing lists, bulletin boards, chat forums and independent news websites.
"Accordingly, new forms of participatory journalism have emerged, expressed in an explosion in the number of blogs and citizen journalism websites that started to challenge the monopoly and hegemony of mainstream media on 'news production assembly lines', and to challenge the ability of the big media conglomerates to set global news agendas deterministically as has been the case for many years in the past.
"These changes are creating more opportunities for broader participation from the marginalised and colonised communities around the world.
"Thus, more space is available for these communities to report on unreported, misreported or unreported news in their localities," he said. NST Online/Pacific Media Watch, 01/06/08.