All Blog Posts from Public Eye

One issue we've been keeping our eye on here is the implications of the increasingly blurring lines between regular citizens engaged in reporting and traditional journalists. Josh Wolf, who calls himself a journalist as well as an activist, spent more than seven months in federal prison for not turning over videotape of a San Francisco street protest. Student Jamal Albarghouti's cell phone footage of the Virginia Tech tragedy, which was played on CNN repeatedly, had us wondering whether citizen journalists might someday put themselves at risk in their quest to cover a story.

Now comes news that journalists were beaten by police at the Los Angeles immigration protests – and part of the reason may be that police couldn't distinguish between traditional journalists and citizen journalists who were also there as activists. Via Lost Remote, here's some pretty amazing video of journalists, both traditional and self-styled, fleeing baton-wielding officers, some of whom struck those holding video cameras.

The police are being investigated for their conduct in the case, which L.A. Police Chief William Bratton has called "inappropriate."

"Our national anchor was being pushed by the batons," Reporter Marcia Garcia of the Spanish-language Telemundo 52 told KCAL-TV, according to the Associated Press. "Our TV set was destroyed — monitors, cables, everything on the ground — it was like a surrealistic nightmare."

Here's a bit more from the AP story:

KPCC radio reporter Patricia Nazario said she was hit in the back and ribs with a baton, then hit her head and twisted her ankle while falling from a blow. She described an interaction with an officer who was hitting her.

"'Why did you hit me? I'm a reporter?'" Nazario recounted Wednesday during an interview on her station. "And he hit me again, harder that time, and I fell; and I fell on the dirt and my phone flew like about 12 feet in front of me."

According to the L.A. Times, some news organizations are considering legal action.

Jill Leovy's excellent eyewitness account of what happened may shed some light on why police acted as they did towards journalists.

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"Citizen Journalism" is one of those phrases that sounds pretty straightforward, but when you get right down to it, most people aren't entirely sure exactly what it means. Basically, a citizen journalist is someone from outside the news business who engages in the kind of journalism that is traditionally the purview of the professionals.



A citizen journalist might send pictures of a significant event into a news outlet. They might share stories about newsworthy experiences they've had. Or they might analyze, report and even disseminate the news themselves. Both MSNBC and CNN have been tapping citizen journalists to augment their coverage – they've used their websites to solicit and post photos from private homes in New Orleans, audio and videos of how people are responding to Katrina, and stories about how high gas prices are affecting peoples' lives, for example.



Are bloggers citizen journalists? Well, yes – and no. Those of us at Public Eye, for example, most certainly are not – after all, we're paid employees of CBS, and that puts us in a different position than someone who starts a blog on their own. But many independent bloggers can certainly be considered citizen journalists: They report from war zones, do the kind of analysis one might find on opinion pages, and post photos of news events on their sites, despite the fact that they're not affiliated with news organizations.



There are, however, reasons for news organizations to be skittish about relying on citizen journalism. The benefits are clear: There are immeasurable positives in having someone who happens to be on the scene of a developing story take pictures or call in a report. But there is also a chance that those reports won't be reliable. (There's that chance with the professionals, of course, as well – Jayson Blair being the most obvious example – but at least, with professional journalists, their jobs depend on their truthfulness.) As David Carr wrote Monday in the New York Times, "I was at the World Trade Center towers site the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. People had seen unimaginable things, but a small percentage, many still covered in ash, told me tales that were worse than what actually happened."

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