I don't know nearly enough about the Israel-Hamas war to give any sort of educated perspective on it besides, "My heart goes out to all of the innocent people who get caught in the middle of this." But I do know a thing or two about journalism, and I can say this with certainty.
This whole "citizen journalism" thing? It's a really horrible idea.
Like bad bad. Super awful.
Saying Elon Musk ever had "goals" when he offered to buy Twitter seems to grossly overstate the level of rigor he put into that decision. But if he did have goals, one of them would have been to cement the platform as the go-to place for citizen journalism, a place where ordinary citizens can post photos, videos, and reactions to live events as they are happening and help drive the narrative of what's going on around the world. He has expressed an interest in this time and time again.
Citizen journalism is a really great idea in theory. The idea of cutting out the media middle man and giving everyone with a smartphone a global platform for sharing what's happening in their neighborhood seems like the natural next iteration of news. It feels like what getting the news should be like in the 21st century. It feels like it could work.
It absolutely does not. There's a reason the list of billionaires who have acquired newspapers is shockingly long: doing good journalism is hard and expensive. The fixed cost to operate a newsroom is pretty high, and unless you're a marquee brand like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, you're not making much revenue per reader. It's just not a good business to be in right now, but thankfully benevolent-ish billionaires like Jeff Bezos have designated it as a public service worth protecting.
And journalism is so expensive because truly great journalism takes a lot of time and resources. Journalists aren't just secretaries for Father Time, scribbling down events as they happen. Their value is in taking an event and placing it in context and elevating the right voices to color in the details and, most importantly, making sure what's being shared is credible. Post-publish corrections are what terrorize journalists at night. You can talk all you want about how the mainstream media biases towards sharing information that supports the left, and I would say you're right. But it's still overwhelmingly factual.
We have no such filter on citizen journalism. It's completely the Wild West. Citizens don't have an editor, and citizens aren't required to publish embarrassing "Correction" notices when they intentionally or unintentionally share false information. And it will always be true that the most important news stories of the year are the ones bad actors have the biggest incentive to lie about. It's playing out in such a shameful, disgusting way in this Israel-Hamas war. It doesn't take a criminal mastermind to share a photo or video of one thing and claim it's another, and yet that's all it can take sometimes to fundamentally shape an entire people's view on something.
We absolutely cannot allow ourselves to rely on a system for journalism that is most likely to cave at the exact moments we need it most. End of story.
Our media landscape is flawed. I will not deny that. But being mad at media bias and thinking the solution is citizen journalism is like being unhappy with your child's elementary school teacher and thinking the solution is to have the kids run the classroom themselves. The kids can't be trusted with that yet. Your solution is causing way more problems than it's solving.
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