Paul Carr of Tech Crunch proclaims: After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth. It's a post assailing Tearah Moore, a 24-year-old soldier who tweeted her experiences inside Fort Hood after last week's massacre.
Pretty big talk for a blogger. That kind of attitude is more in keeping with Carr's old job at the the Guardian.
Carr's post is a confused but self-righteous rant. Therein he accuses Moore of being a narcissist with scant regard for privacy and human dignity. He says she exemplifies the defects of citizen journalism as a whole.
The headline sets you up to expect that he's mainly going to trash Moore for getting her facts wrong. She did make mistakes. Like a lot of paid reporters, Moore incorrectly reported that the shooter had been killed when in fact he was only critically wounded and that there was more than one shooter.
When judging Moore and other citizen journalists, it helps to keep a few things in mind.
1. Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crud, citizen journalism and paid journalism included. For the sake of argument, let's assume Moore's tweets sucked as news. That's not an indictment of citizen journalism, per se. When the field is open to anyone with a cellphone, quality will be variable.
2. Caveat emptor. In the immediate aftermath of a crisis, rumor and confusion is the norm. We're accustomed and even eager to get this kind of fragmentary information filtered through professional reporters. But where do they get it? Generally speaking, from the same the very same untrained bystanders who can now tweet their observations. Hopefully, a reporter will talk several people and try to synthesize their input into something more coherent. But garbage in, garbage out. Thanks to twitter, a reader can sit at home and try to piece together their own picture from multiple tweets. Professional news and tweets aren't an either-or proposition. Most people who cared enough to follow Moore's tweets were probably following the professional media at the same time.
3. Mediums and messengers aren't good or bad in themselves. The issue is how a critical reader uses the information. Maybe we need to talk more explicitly about epistemological norms in journalism vs. woman-on-the-street tweets.
4. Carr accuses Moore of being an "inhuman egoist" for taking pictures of the wounded in a hospital. If a professional photojournalist got that kind of access, he or she would be on the fast-track to a Pulitzer. I am so sick of people who look at photographs of crimes, wars, and celebrities (i.e., everyone) and call the journalists who take them bloodsuckers. Carr likens Moore to people who won't dial 911 because they're too busy tweeting the accident. Unless Carr has some evidence that Moore was neglecting other responsibilities, that's an invalid and offensive comparison.
5. You can second-guess Moore's decision to publish certain photos without denigrating citizen photojournalism in general. Publishing is always a morally loaded decision, whether you're getting paid or not. You're responsible for what you put out there, whether you're a professional or an amateur. These days, more and more journalists are working without a net because there aren't as many editors as there used to be. Quality control is expensive and the reading public seems unwilling to pay for it. So, these decisions are increasingly falling to individuals in the field.
6. What's with the egoism charge? Maybe it's egotistic to assume that the world cares what you put on your bagel this morning. It's hardly conceited to think that the world might be interested in first-hand dispatches from a news event that's riveting the entire country. Tweeting is sharing. Sharing is good. Professional journalists are always patting themselves on the back for their desire to inform the public. We should give volunteers the same respect.
7. Carr seems to assume that citizen journalists have a heightened moral responsibility to respect the privacy of the people around them. I admit, it gets complicated because citizen journalists may have conflicting roles that limit what they can ethically disclose. If Moore was a hospital employee who was bound to respect patient confidentiality, then obviously she shouldn't have been tweeting about patients. But Carr doesn't say that she had any particular conflict of interest.
8. On the flip side, this Fort Hood is Moore's community. This was happening to her. Why does a photographer from a newspaper have more of a right to tell the story than she does?
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