November 20, 2005
A Merry Un-Birthday to Journalists
Which source would you trust for coverage of the Iraqi reaction to the military operations in Iraq: an American journalist or an Iraqi blogger.
Before you answer, let me remind you that this is about Iraqi reactions.
If you would trust an American journalist for this one, all I can say is: "you're as mad as a hatter!" Some coverage of journalism is subjective and calls for people who understand the context of the situation. An American wouldn't know the cultural contexts necessary for giving an accurate interpretation of another culture's response.
This can be seen in Zeyad's Healing Iraq, to which Zeyad said in We the Media: "...coming from an Iraqi, they [the readers] give it more credence than if it were coming from Western journalists."
Like the Mad Hatter declared a "merry un-birthday" in Alice in Wonderland, ordinary people with extraordinary knowledge of important events of our time are becoming journalists. And electronic media again are causing us again to redefine everything, including journalism.
I have alluded to postmodern theory regarding digital media before. This is yet another example of the decentralization of episteme (Greek: Knowledge): with the diversity of individual expertise, instead of people turning to one comprehensive source of knowledge, we can turn to compartmentalized sources of knowledge.
This is the core feature of the internet. Because it is so easy to publish, we get not just a range of trustworthy and untrustworthy sources--that is too simplistic and dualistic--but also a wide range of specializations by people who are passionate about their specialty. Thus, we can't know everything, but we can all know something.
Posted by EvanReynolds at November 20, 2005 10:23 PM
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