I'm not a journalist, and I don't pretend to be one, but I know it when I see bad journalism. Yesterday's incident in which CNN falsely reported, via its iReport "citizen journalism" website, that Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, had suffered a heart attack. Apple's stock took a bit of a dive before it could come out and deny the report. The damage had, however, been done.
CNN is on all of the time at my office in the cafeteria, so I've seen this iReport fea
tured quite a few times. To me, it just seems lazy. Yes, it's all well and good that normal people like you and me can send in first-hand footage of a newsworthy event. But, we're not journalists. As soon as an entity like CNN, which touts itself as "the best news team on television", issues a false report submitted by "Joe Six Pack" (thanks for that one, Sarah Palin), it loses its credibility.
There are plenty of ways that the average person can try their hand at journalism. Blogging is the most popular form, and it has its place. There are many respectable blogs out there, as there are plenty of bad ones. I hope this blog fits somewhere in the middle (well, I hope at least some people other than myself get something out of it). But what they all have in common is there are no real standards for blogs. I can just type whatever I want, which is great, but it does not make it a reputable source. The moment you start mixing that with something as widely followed as CNN, you can easily get what happened yesterday with Apple. CNN: stop letting Joe Six Pack do your job for you.
CNN is on all of the time at my office in the cafeteria, so I've seen this iReport fea
tured quite a few times. To me, it just seems lazy. Yes, it's all well and good that normal people like you and me can send in first-hand footage of a newsworthy event. But, we're not journalists. As soon as an entity like CNN, which touts itself as "the best news team on television", issues a false report submitted by "Joe Six Pack" (thanks for that one, Sarah Palin), it loses its credibility.There are plenty of ways that the average person can try their hand at journalism. Blogging is the most popular form, and it has its place. There are many respectable blogs out there, as there are plenty of bad ones. I hope this blog fits somewhere in the middle (well, I hope at least some people other than myself get something out of it). But what they all have in common is there are no real standards for blogs. I can just type whatever I want, which is great, but it does not make it a reputable source. The moment you start mixing that with something as widely followed as CNN, you can easily get what happened yesterday with Apple. CNN: stop letting Joe Six Pack do your job for you.
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