Response: Week 9

While I have no doubt that citizen journalism with eventually have an impact of democracy, (and could argue that it’s already starting) the question to comes to mind is one of reliability.  For political issues, many people turn to “professional” sources.  How will people begin to sift through the rumors and the truth in citizen journalism in relation to political matters?  Will there be a ton of conspiracy theories floating around, or will reports remain accurate?

This question interests me most because it is so multi-dimensional.   Citizen journalism has already influenced an increase of transparency within government.  One prime example of this transparence is wikileaks.  While I normally would consider a site like this unreliable, the knowledge that the man responsible for leaking the Pentagon papers is involved eases my suspicions.  Knowing that the key players aren’t average joe’s from po-dunk, Kansas, but professionals with political and journalism experience makes me feel like I can trust the site a bit more.

Wikileaks works to improve governmental transparency, but the problem is that government transparency isn’t increasing because of this website.  These journalists have to go through crazy measures to meet with sources, and keep their server information secret from the government.  If governmental officials could get their hands on the wikileaks server I have no doubt that the site would be shut down and no argument about freedom of speech would bring it back.  So, using this example, governmental transparency is not improving because of this website, it’s improving because people are taking drastic measure to reveal information that would otherwise be kept secret.

I’ve already established that I trust this site because of those in charge of it’s operation, however, I haven’t delved into if I should trust all the content posted on the site.  As stated above, a lot of the information presented on wikileaks would otherwise be kept from the public.  This raises the question: Is the goal of wikileaks to broadcast sensationalized information or conspiracy theories?  Information gathered about the government can’t be groundbreaking or huge all the time.  One has to wonder if wikileaks is so popular because it broadcasts only huge stories.  I think I would trust this site a bit more if there were a balance of stories on presented.

There is so more research to be done on this topic:  Are the only really popular citizen journalism stories the sensationalized ones?  Are we reverting back to the days of “yellow journalism”?