Washington Post Reporter Comes After Citizen Journalists
22nd November 2023
Most of the time, single posts on Twitter/X aren’t worth rebuking with an entire piece, but Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi laid out an absolute banger this weekend when he lamented the idea of “citizen journalists” not being as professional, trained or equipped as he or his colleagues at major news outlets like the Post, New York Times or CNN. The idea that citizen journalists are not every bit as capable as journalists employed by these outlets (and others) is ridiculous and should be rebuffed.
Farhi posted, “Someone invented the phrase ‘citizen journalism’ a few years ago to describe amateurs doing the work of pros. Yes, it occasionally works, but probably no more often than ‘citizen cop,’ ‘citizen attorney’ or ‘citizen soldier.’”
There’s a lot to unpack here, starting with the idea of citizen versus professional journalist. When professional journalists at Newsweek sat on the Monica Lewinsky story, trying to figure out how to minimize the damage to their great white hope then-president Bill Clinton, a citizen journalist broke the story — perhaps the biggest of the decade. When professional journalists attempted to kill the John Edwards story, the National Enquirer ran with it and effectively ended any political ambitions Edwards may have had.