How citizen journalism is changing political reporting

Citizen reporting threatens the club from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Anyone who has followed the 2008 presidential campaign knows that a few key media flash points have helped  shape the narrative of this race. In two of these episodes, the same citizen journalist was at center stage.

But the reality of her involvement is far different than what you’ve probably read in the traditional media.

I remember my being slightly miffed when I had heard that an Off the Bus citizen journalist had reported Barack Obama’s "bitter" small-town Pennsylvanians remark during a fund-raiser in San Francisco — miffed because the remarks supposedly were "off the record."

Not so, Off the Bus co-founder Jay Rosen corrected on Friday during a citizen media session I helped spearhead at the MIT Media Lab during the Future of Civic Media conference. I found Rosen’s version of events needed amplification, so I conducted this 10-minute video interview.

Obama’s ‘bitter’ remarks

Rosen detailed how amateur reporter Mayhill Fowler was invited to attend Obama’s fund-raiser in San Francisco, which was closed to the press but not off the record — a critical difference. There were no admonitions given not to write about it, and those who invited Fowler in knew of her affiliation.

Indeed, the Obama campaign immediately recognized the new realities of accountability and transparency in the age of anyone-can-be-a-reporter and decreed that anything Obama said in front of groups or crowds would henceforth be deemed on the record.

This was now part of their "working assumption," Rosen said: What the candidate utters aloud is now public.

The Obama campaign’s chastened (and wise) reaction stood in stark contrast to the reactions from many in the Washington press corps, who accused Mayhill of breaking a basic journalistic tenet and violating the Obama campaign’s trust.

One top political journalist even accused Mayhill of "leaking" the story — even though it was said to a roomful of people and she wrote openly about the incident. "In her [the political journo’s] mind, the press wasn’t there, so it was a leak," Rosen said.

The story richocheted around the mainstream media at warp speed — from the Huffington Post on Friday to Politico.com to the Drudge Report to the lead story on Sunday’s "Meet the Press" and occupied the political discourse (with the full encouragement of the Clinton campaign) for a full three weeks.

Rosen describes the incident in depth on his PressThink blog here.

The Clinton "scumbag" saga

Fowler again caused a media ruckus in South Dakota on June 2, on the night of the final primaries, when she stood in a rope line and asked Bill Clinton a question about a Vanity Fair hit piece. Clinton gripped her right hand while she recorded the conversation with her left hand, allowed that the reporter was a "scumbag."

For the next week, cable news had a field day, first wondering about the stability of the former president and his penchant for verbal slips during the campaign and then castigating Fowler for deception — for not announcing that she was a reporter. "The pro-journalist fraternity went crazy because she didn’t play by their rules," Rosen said. Rosen wrote about the second episode on his blog here.

My first reaction, when I heard this, was a lament that public officials would no longer be able to robustly express their true opinions whenever they were out in public — and there is still some danger that this may happen.

But Rosen persuaded me that we are all eyewitness reporters now and shouldn’t have to hew to a convention devised chiefly not to offend an official so that the journalist could retain access to him or her. In truth, there is no hard and fast standard that a journalist must identify herself whenever she happens upon a newsworthy event, and one can point to thousands of examples where that has happened.

The Washington press corps — "the club," Rosen calls them — think differently. But many of the chummy "off the record" or "deep background" press briefings are not held to enlighten the reporters and in turn the public, but rather for "agenda setting and currying favor," Rosen said.

That is not to say that Obama or Clinton shouldn’t be able to talk privately with their aides, trusted individuals or even journalists. They should. But the zone of privacy is shrinking and transparency is the new norm. The days of the media not reporting FDR’s polio or JFK’s womanizing are long gone.

The lesson for journalism is the lesson that Off the Bus sought out to prove: that "the club" may serve the interests of the media corporation (perhaps) but does not always serve the public interest.

"News organizations should send in reporters who aren’t concerned with whether [top Clinton aide] Howard Wolfson is gonna talk with them in November," Rosen said. "Civilization isn’t going to collapse if you don’t go off the record."

Jeff Jarvis wrote not long ago about the need to dispatch off-the-record briefings, suggesting it was a historical artifact tied to a now crumbling, incestuous politico-media deal with the devil. Background briefings and confidential sources still have their place in the journalism constellation — but only if journalists set strict limits and enforce them.

Rosen summed up the bottom line regarding these two incidents this way: "The club of political reporters and politicos can’t control the information flow anymore."

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JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.