Are citizen journalists more trustworthy than professional journalists?

Yes

2 of 9

by Gary C. Gibson

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Citizen journalists have a better chance of writing for the interests of U.S. citizens than 'professional' journalists that write generally for their employer trans-national corporate interests. I put the word 'professional' in quotes because it simply means to profess, and formerly referred to the 'professions' such as were considered doctors, lawyers, teachers and such but today refers also to career burger flippers at McDonald's. Pro journalists may lack anything beside personal egoist ethics. They may be pimps looking for a story to print for money without regard for it's effect upon the individual or the nation. They may follow corporate global profit goals toward political corporatism and jettison the United States as anything besides being a vassal of corporatist exploitation.

Are citizen blogger-journalists more trust-worthy to whom? Networks don't 'trust' non-corporate data without verification. Corporate media want material that will build up their profits, Citizen journalists may be working to build a better society. if you are a globalist investor you probably would trust the journalistic pros on the corporate payroll because that's where your own money is bet. The point for such is to crush the little guys out of existence-keep them broke and marginalized.

In some respects citizen-journalists have different interests than journalistic pros and a more varied range of subject materials. Yet if one wants to think of oneself as a journalist, who is a citizen rather than a trans-nationalist I am all for that. It is more likely that citizens should have an apposite rather than an opposite interest poltically.

Since the end of the cold war professional journalists have gone entirely over to the evil empire and tirelessly work in opposition to U.S. national interests. They work against local democratic independence and lead in the social training of national constituencies for a kind of apathetic-passive observer relationship to politics. Politics is viewed as entertainment through corporate journalist filters. C.N.N. finally ditched Lou Dobbs for being opposed to illegal alien invasion of the United States over the Mexican border. Trans-national corpoartists prefer cheap labor in the United States.

Anyone with more than five hundred competetive posts at helium with stars may be a member of the national press club for fifty dollars each month. Bloggers may not earn that much so they opt out. They must focus on quality writing and buy fuel or food-maybe a plane ticket. Professional journalists may be on a tax deductible expense account and be half-actors with a camera crew shooting them all around from 360 degrees or from the ground up. Big advertising revenue sharing. One wants the clever woman with the nice figure on the show with you.

Large budget productions can scoop the voyeuristic trade of course. One want glamor too. It might be possible to form a mercenary journalist corps of fightin reporters engaging the Taliban in battle without being embedded with soldiers-besides-the mselves. I however would simply blog from a non-interventionist distance and pray for the lost if I remembered. News and reality T.V. kind of blend in together. They may form a reality show in Afghanistan. What about live shots of the Chinese copper mining operation there? Pro journalists could wear Chinese Army Uniforms with red stars on their collars to seem friendly and get the inside story.

Pro journalists don't try to repair things, they just watch them up close. The power to make people subjective like insects on a microscope slide is their amusement, as at N.P.R. they tend to be careerists. Nothing ever changes in their detached point of view, everything will always remain the same socially and they will collect large paychecks until dying or moving on to another venue because they are unfashionably old or whatever. The establishment of professional network broadcast journalists pre-determines the existence of a particular paradigm of social structure and possible solutions. The basic problem is the concentration of power in any given network and corporate phenomenality rather than the activity itself. One might hope that writers and society could evolve better ways of assuring social peace and stability for all, yet the crass social toss a grenade or horseshoe level of accuracy seems all that is expected,and delivered in the present yet changing criterion.

Actually I was a journeyman painter, and believe that the 'journalist' term became obsolete with the end of the horse drawn coach through the French countryside era, which was extended a bit by the Butterfield Stage coach operations in the American southwest. Journalists to Buckley Station Nevada writing about the gold prospects in the hills would have been fair enough. So would one as late as Ernest Hemmingway who seemed to get the wrong political parties as .P.O.U.M. fascists confused-they were actually radical Trotskyites in the Spanish civil war. I wouldn't want to throw all writers in to the 'professional journalists' set of broadcast flunkies for various trans-national networks of course. There are just too many fine writers out their that unfortunately call themselves journalists for lack of a commonly recognized substitute term for the one corrupted by the velocity of cash worldwide...go with the flow is the professional journalist motto of the day.

Citizen blogger-writers may form raw data from innumerable sources to provide adequate theoretical analysis of the economic truth of things that can benefit citizens of the United States or any country. What is required is freedom to observe, blog and post on U-Tube and MySPACE.com. Acer computer with video cameras built in can use windows movie makers to make brief outdoor films or upload of whats what. If one has the freedom from being machine gunned or otherwise killed by junta forces in Guinea or wherever it is possible to get objective portrayals of actual political and environmental events.

Trans-national journalists are advocates de facto for a particular brand of corporate oligarchic socialism (sort of like an albatross-elephant-g ator). They create a cold blooded narcissistic voyeuristic ethos that is more than a little tilted to enrich the socialist dialectical destruction of individualism, individual work for oneself without paying corporate tithes and actual democracy.

Some networking or travelling writer-film producer opinions are of course good. Even the federal government provides a service for Alaska in gathering intelligence on corrupt politicians that the state does not provide for itself since they are too busy taking brides and kickbacks and keeping the state capital inaccessible to the poor living in Fairbanks and Anchorage down in Juneau a thousand miles away.

Citizen journalists are advocates for the interests of citizens instead of corporate profit evil fairies dedicated to taking the money from your wallet. I think Americans could exist in a democratic society with self-reliance and a gelled trans-national corporate authority that takes no more than 20% of the gross national product for itself out of the country, or out of the hands of the 80% of the people that produce it and are citizens of the United States. Americans should take back America from the globalists. Other countries such as Britain rely on foreign resources to keep a high standard of living and are pro-globalist to the max. Patrick Henry Nathan Hale and Thomas Jefferson were revolutionaries against such global skimming of U.S. interests-and pretty fare citizen-journalists too, along with old Ben Franklin.

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