Blog #2: Journalistic Privileges

While citizen journalists have a greater advantage in reporting on critically dangerous conflicts that professional journalists may not be able to cover, citizen journalists should not be granted the same privileges professional journalists have. 

Citizen journalists are not tied to a news source. They are unprotected because most are amateurs and do not understand the consequences of pursuing a story. In Syria, more than half of the journalists killed were civilian journalists. In the conflict surrounding the Islamic State, even James Foley and Steven Sotloff, professional journalists who had access and experience, could not protect themselves from harm while investigating the atrocities occurring in the area. There is no advantage in extending special privileges to citizen journalists because that only encourages them to put themselves in harm’s way unnecessarily.

More importantly, citizen journalists are not bound by the journalistic ethics professional journalists follow. This makes their reporting subjective, which tends to provoke more conflicts than provide factual information. For example, the Ferguson shooting was blown up into a national controversy, mainly due to stories and graphics on social media posted by citizen journalists. These stories and graphics may or may not have been taken out of context to favor the citizen journalists’ views and advance their own agendas, whether it be pushing equality for minorities or sparking anarchy. The main issue with citizen journalists is that the information and sources are not verified, because their goal is to break the story as soon as possible, whereas professional journalists takes a while to report the whole truth. That is why professional journalists are given special privileges. That is why professional journalists have credibility and why citizen journalists tend to be questioned on the accuracy of their stories.