There was a time – and not so long ago at that – when the mass distribution of a personal opinion was a very restricted process. In the medium of print, in particular, to deliver a personal opinion on any subject, citizens would have to submit a letter to a publication where it would be scrutinized for legitimacy and for absence of libel before being considered for printing. Consequently, anything even mildly dubious or accusatory was often discarded by meticulous editors. Furthermore, given the limited number of column inches available for letters in most publications, the number of personal opinions being printed and read was therefore relatively small.
The computer revolution, and particularly the attendant informal information platforms – blogs; twitter; etc. – changed all that. These days, anyone with an internet connection can distribute his/her opinion or reaction to any subject under the sun and there are no screens or barriers whatsoever to the process. Furthermore, given the completely different nature of the internet, there are also no restrictions on the number of these pronouncements, and their potential reach is staggering with millions of potential readers at hand. Within probably less than a decade, mankind has gravitated towards this widely enhanced “freedom of expression” with a speed and on a scale that has surprised even our more visionary social scientists.
The issue here, however – and a recent comment by the Guyana Press Association (GPA) referred to it – is that we now live in societies where, in effect, the professional journalism business is being affected by, as the GPA termed it, “citizen journalism with its attendant advantages and disadvantages”.
It is bewildering indeed to be confronted on a daily basis by this multitude of electronic pronouncements, on every subject under the sun, that is not
only being consumed but even relayed to lists of others (another significant change) as gospel. As recently as two decades ago, persons relating questionable happenings or statements would defend them, when challenged, on the basis that “it was in the newspaper”; that was the barometer of authenticity. Today, such dubious matters now have a new imprimatur: “it was on the internet”, and the irony is that with infinitely more means of information available we probably have to spend more time trying to determine the reality of most things happening around us. One factor is simply volume; the other is authenticity.
As a general point, the terms “citizen journalism” or “informal journalism” are in fact oxymorons. A journalist is a person trained to deal with the gathering and delivery of news along specific guidelines as required by the publication; an ordinary citizen, therefore, is practicing opinionism, not journalism, when he/she makes public pronouncements on a subject. A news item produced by a professional journalist is predicated on having been verified by at least two independent sources (some newspapers require three) and editors will frequently reject stories that do not pass that test.
Certainly there are personal opinions expressed by feature writers in newspapers and magazines and radio broadcasts (you are reading one right now), but these are not news items, and the persons who write them are not journalists – they are columnists. Such things may be better written, and make for more entertaining reading than the depressing front-page items, but they are simply opinions or a personal unraveling of events that are not required to meet the journalism standards on veracity that would apply to hard news stories. Indeed, proof of this need for journalistic scrutiny can be seen in several recent instances here where happenings reported in newspapers as fact turned out to be false.
During my time in Canada I spent two years in a B.A. Journalism daytime programme at Ryerson U in Toronto and two of the Journalism News Commandments(or JNCs) were, “get it confirmed”, and “do not express your opinion”. In that process, opinions could only appear in a news story if they were attributed to some pertinent expert or official. In the world-famous Watergate reporting coverage, even such seasoned Washington Post professionals as Woodward and Bernstein had to meet Ben Bradlee’s stringent verification standards for their stories to run.
It goes without saying that there are many columnists who are careful with their research and their fact-checking and are meeting self-imposed journalism standards in that way, but the dilemma here for the news consumer is that presence on the internet platform does not necessarily identify the professional from the merely interested citizen.
Compounding the problem is the astonishing number of persons to whom the internet is not so much a place for information but a diversion providing an arena for them to voice their opinions, or flex their imagination, or play silly jokes on whoever owns a computer. Some of these excursions are obviously harmless fun, but some appear in a very serious mien and can deceive even sophisticated targets, such as the US Congressmen who were recently avidly discussing pictures of the murdered Osama Bin Laden only to later discover that they were fakes.
On the business side, there is also the growing pressure on the print media to deal with stories that hit the internet screens within minutes of their taking place. In the interest of not getting caught short, there have been examples recently, here and overseas, of attempts to cover the subject in print before all the journalism standards of fact checking have been met.
The internet revolution is a bonanza for mankind in many ways, but it has put us headfirst into a maelstrom of misinformation and outright falsehoods and much of the time we are in a condition of trying to make sense out of nonsense.
The line between information or informed debate, on the one hand, and simply individual opinion and musing, on the other, has become blurred by the condition we now have where we are considering professional journalism pieces along with a shoot-from-the-hip burst of conjecture by some individual whose only credentials are that he/she has internet access.
Of course, we’re never going to go back to the way things were – the benefits from the internet far outweigh the drawbacks – but we certainly have to take care to tiptoe through the internet landscape to avoid stepping on that mushy brown stuff in search of the hard facts. It wasn’t always that way, but so it go now.
