“Every citizen is a journalist” – These five words, spoken by Oh Yeon-Ho (2004) resulted in the launch of an Internet based publication for which 727 “citizen reporters” volunteered to supply news and commentary from their own perspectives. This site was called OhMyNews and four years after its launch in 2000 it had more that 32,000 citizen reporters and worldwide respect. Citizen journalism can be the best way to capture what really happens when an event occurs as those who capture it in either photos or words were already there when it happened. A good example to use is the tragic events of the London bombings on July 7th 2005:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=e3G2P21KXqY&feature=related
This clip includes videos from mobiles phones of those who were directly affected by the bombings and we see images that we would never have been able to see on the news as none of those reporters were in the midst of the chaos when it happened.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article642303.ece
Another good example of reporting the news literally from the front line is the number of videos created by the armed forces, and even though they are genuine videos of real life situations they can be captured at the wrong moment in order to make the people in the video look worse than they are. The following video is of Afghan and US soldiers working together at taking down men who earlier on had been violating women and shooting at the coalition forces.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=J1KC0REoGFc
However it is titled “US Special Forces and Afghan Soldiers beat unarmed man for no reason” and makes the soldiers look like bullies. Like mainstream media, through which what we see, hear and read are edited to suit those who do not want us to know certain fact, citizen journalism can do the same. It is about how people capture the moment that determines how we perceive the events. This video could have been filmed in order to make the US forces look bad and contribute to the lack of support for the troops out in Iraq and Afghanistan, which proves that whilst citizen journalism is a great new way of reporting the news as it happens first hand, it also proves that it can be manipulated in the same way the mainstream media is to suit the political and moral views of those who film the events on their own camera.
Sources used:
Citizen Journalism: A Case Study – Bentley, C. Hamman, B. Littau, J. Meyer, H. Watson, B. Welsh, B.
