Citizen Journalists!? Fie Upon Them, I Say, Fie!

David Hazinski, former NBC correspondent,
unaware of the fact that bad comb-overs
significantly destroy credibility and
erode the trust of one's audience.

Shorter David Hazinski:

• The news industry should find some way to regulate and monitor so-called "citizen journalists" like bloggers and pipples with camera-phones, because otherwise "(i)t's just a matter of time before something like a faked Rodney King beating video[¿¡!?] appears on the air somewhere", and then nobody will ever trust the news industry ever again, ever.

Joo know, four or five years ago, some frotacíonado calling for an unconstitutional and unprecedented step like Hazinski does here:

The news industry should find some way to monitor and regulate this new trend.

That would have been enough to send thousands of bloggers straight into a white hot rage of righteous indignation about how the media gatekeepers were just scared of losing their phoney-baloney jobs and how dare they so blithely talk about potentially violating blogger's first amendment rights, and so on.

But nowadays, it's no big deal. The reality is that Hazinski can do nothing to stop the transformation he sees going on right in front of him, and further, he can do nothing to prevent the bloggers from having even more of an influence on popular media, and can enforce exactly none of his own protectionist ideas. Add in an inability, or unwillingness, to confront how rarely journalists live up to their much vaunted codes of ethics, and the pathetic state of their quickly dissolving credibility, and one can only wonder what motivated a fine paper like the AJC to give the gentleman so much whitespace on their OpEd page, as he seems to have written the editorial equivalent of "OMGodzors! Teh angry citizen journalists wIll ruin journalism for everyone!!1!".

Ay, Sr. Hazinski, 2003 called, they want to know if you need your blankie back.

above: Hazinski needs this back

"Shorter" concept created, perfected and popularized by some completely different blogueros altogether.

photo by CURTIS COMPTON/Staff (ajc)

Comments

[john in california]

Hello Mr. Negro,
First time commenter ( I'm waiting for my … mmm smack )... thank you, and now to the point
I followed you from atrios haloscan, where I was soapboxing Wexler's petition and recognized your handle from comments you have left at O'digby's place, and thought " hmmm, how hard is it to comment w/ an accent?.. " No, actually, I thought, "... el Negro is no doubt all over this impeachment thing, and I will go to his website and find Wexler's goofy face and a link, for sure..! but , not so much. So.. I have beeen leaving this little message at various sites (those that don’t require a login!) w/o any takers, not even responders, you know, someone saying, “Impeachment is so yesterday” or “ Nancy says no-no” , nothing, nada. So, since you are a ‘respected’ member of the blog community (see, I did read the post at hand) maybe you can tell me, Whass up? Is it the message or me (I always bathe my comments in word before posting) ?
Why isn’t Impeachment the rallying cry of the left?