Journalism as a Reflection of "New Technology, New Voices"

Patrick Butler's "New Technology, New Voices" article provides a concise yet wide-ranging analysis of new media technologies' impact across many cultures. In addition to finding commonalities and differences globally, he also focuses on the journalists and citizens' lives who have access into situations that an outsider likely would not.

The article also demystified some commonly held notions such as: the exaggerated effectiveness of China's Internet censorship and that Americans lead the mobile technology world. Modernized and centrally-populated countries like South Korea certainly are known to be among the world's mobile technology leaders. However that in 2007 or earlier, many African countries, such as remote areas in Botswana had mobile access to the news media as their primary if not their only source of news access. Whereas at this time the United States mostly used mobile technology for personal use and to vote in their favorite "American Idol" contestent; the idea of how other counties use mobile technology is inspiring in two ways: news information can inform people in relatively isolated areas where newspapers are not easily found and that South Korea successfully used SMS to vote in a way that had a great impact.

The opening story of Egyptian Wael Abbas, who lost his paid employment as a journalist due to his contribution to raising the issue of abuse by police in Mubarak's government, effectively demonstrated what I assume many traditionally-trained American journalists would not be willing to do in terms of sacrifice. The reasons that American reporters do not often take on such perils are not that our mainstream media frequently exposes injustices on its own or that American freelances generally have an easier time completing investigative work. Instead it seems that the press of the United States is often too large of a bureaucracy in the psyche of most Americans to be overcome or simply that the general lack of urgency does not justify selflessness.


In a broader sense simply the way we approach technology says a lot about Americans as a society of individuals that often treads political deviance carefully or quietly. Whereas other countries have a portion of a population that will risk themselves to varying degrees to record important events so that they are noticed, like Butler mentions in the article, Americans would rather engage or create news from an armchair more often than not. It might be because we believe we believe that we all have too much at stake to lose or it could be because we are trained to be passive consumers for the typically.

Butler caused me to think about at what point is someone not only a citizen journalist or a traditional journalist. Instead another question for me was when is a citizen a journalist, an activist, or simply a trill-seeker. In the end do any of these distinctions matter if it is about what they record and how it is interpreted by those it is distributed to. Ultimately the answer seems to end up being that the reception of the work determines how we brand all parties from the person who recorded it to the subjects they recorded to the interpretations of its audience.  

Seldes, Stone, & Their Nightmare

Reading about Jeff Cohen’s articles “George Seldes Leaves a Legacy of Courage” and “Izzy Stone, Patron Saint of Bloggers” caused me to reflect on what the true issue might be in journalism today. At many times both Seldes and Stone experienced substantial government opposition to their journalistic pursuits. During the mid-to-late 20^th century the minority concern was that too many in the media industry did not function with the “fourth estate” or watchdog goals of media as their goals. The concern went further than not digging deep enough into some important stories. Whether a reporter was self-censored or influenced by corporate bureaucratic, many willfully bowed to pressure to gloss over government activities that were almost certainly would cast them into a negative light.

            The undermining of the free press ideal that was internalized in those decades earlier has grown in their scope as government interests have spread even more both domestically and internationally. As a result of the American government and political system’s deeper embedding with Wall Street, the nation’s media has been dragged along to spread their policy of journalistic “non-aggression” from not just each outlet’s advertisers to the interests of the financial sector. Just as the mainstream media has resisted challenging the American political machine for years and casting the blatant offenders as “bad apples” and rarely questioning any aspects of our system’s own dysfunction; much of the same treatment is how scandals in the financial industry are handled.

            Seldes and Stone’s work proves that there have been resistances to the mainstream media’s passive embedding with outside forces that greatly compromise journalistic values. The scary part is that not only has government embedding become more pronounced but the embedding policy has been spread to other influential groups to the point where the “news” is a simply a filtered cigarette. The media gives whatever the intrigue, which like nicotine will keep the audience craving what keeps them hooked. The smoke the American public inhales is a slanted message from one of the powerful groups that are embedded with the media. The ulterior motivates in the messages may vary but in general they encourage the public to be equally as docile and receptive to their agenda as the media that transmitted them.

            Seldes and Stone dedicated most of their careers to revealing the truth and informing the public, in this era it usually is more difficult to perform the type that of journalism for many reasons. Globalization has intertwined politics, media, and business around the world making the issues as well as their censorship a complex task to understand let along report on. Even if you believe you have the full story getting a media outlet that will publish the story that has a decent exposure is also difficult. The fact that is it easier to self-publish is both a blessing and a curse, as the Internet has become hard to navigate with a massive clutter of individuals all vying at once for attention.

            In the end Seldes and Stone have not been celebrated enough in the wider education of media, which also speaks volumes about what role models most want to set for future journalists.