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The presence of bias in citizen journalism and journalism, in general, is an unfortunate reality. As citizen journalism continues to develop, the methods utilized to overcome the inherent bias of an author or organization will determine it's long term viability. Both the content and the mediums used to publish the works of a citizen journalist need to undergo careful scrutiny to ensure that citizen reporting is held to the same standards of objectivity and fairness that traditional media outlets are held to.

In December of 2005, UCLA released a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics to attempt to quantify and examine whether media bias did exist. The results of three years of research were unequivocal: that media bias does indeed exist. Examples of both traditional media (television and print news) and non traditional media (Internet web sites etc..) were included in this study. Facing this information, the citizen journalist must take additional steps to temper both obvious and subtle inherent bias in their reporting.

The journalist often brings the shades of their personal bias both intentionally and unintentionally to their work. Citizen journalists need to hold their work the same standards of journalistic objectivity and fairness they expect to see from traditional media sources and potentially need to take extra steps to hold themselves to a higher standard.

There are core methods to temper bias: the avoidance of obvious references to the author's opinion (the use of "I"); the effective governance of sources representative of both sides of an issue; critical analysis of an issue without utilizing terms that diminish the opposing opinion (the use of subtle supportive language to manipulate the reader); examination of "unchallenged assumptions" and scrutiny of whether personal or cultural stereotypes are reflected in the work. There are watchdog organizations such as FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) that have well defined standards that the independent journalist can hold themselves to.

A citizen journalist should consistently strive for a reasonable level of journalist detachment and should make every effort to to adhere to the ideal of objectivity. Failure to do so, diminishes the voracity and efficacy of the coverage of contemporary issues by citizen journalists. That same standard should be utilized to temper the media outlets that are used to publish their works.

The expansion of new media outlets on the Internet has allowed for a certain

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