Citizen journalism is working far better than perhaps anyone expected.  While traditional media has abandoned its responsibility and ethics to report unbiased news, citizen journalists have taken over the blogosphere and taken their cameras to the streets to find truth.

The former technique is one reason traditional newspapers are on their last legs. The latter technique is capturing truth so well that those being filmed resort to violence and intimidation in order to prevent it.

Why?

The answer goes back to a key phrase from an American cultural icon: Allen Funt.

Yes, I said, “Allen Funt.”

“Candid Camera” was not only a groundbreaking television show, it was a groundbreaking exercise in behavioral psychology.  Mr. Funt told audiences that they were enjoying, “people getting caught in the act of being themselves.” In that case, it was innocuous entertainment.

In the case of citizen journalists filming left-wing protests, it’s akin to war zone photography. The numerous incidences of protestors intimidating or assaulting citizen journalists have been posted here on the BIG websites all too often.

Why such hostility?

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Last week, the DNC announced the launch of “The Accountability Project,” a new website volunteer project “to hold Republican candidates accountable for their claims, their public statements, and their campaign tactics.”  To call the project “grassroots” while a banner at the bottom of the page states that the site is paid for by the Democratic National Committee is surely pushing the frontiers of shamelessness; but desperate times call for desperate measures.  For citizen journalists have been making the news as well as reporting in recent weeks, and not in ways favorable to the left.

On the reporting front, the career of far-left journalist Helen Thomas was ended by a camera-wielding Rabbi posting footage of her anti-Semitic rantings on his website.  Meanwhile, conservative citizen journalists have been physically assaulted, notably by Democrat representative Bob Etheridge and at a campaign event for Illinois senatorial candidate Alexi Giannoulias.   It seems that, when it comes to citizen journalism, liberals can dish it out, but they can’t take it, and in considering just why they are apparently so touchy with respect to this particular manifestation of “new” media, we need to look at the a bigger picture, one which goes beyond the significance of the stories broken, or the merits or otherwise of the tactics employed; what is really remarkable is that conservative “citizen journalists” exist at all, and that they are reaching an increasingly wide audience with their exposure of the antics of liberal activists and Democrat politicians.  You see, it was not supposed to be like this. (more…)

The idea of citizens writing the news is not a new one. In fact, it is an idea that is as old as the newspaper itself.

There were no professional journalists around 50 BC when Julius Caesar, serving as the First Counsul of Rome, ordered scribes to publish the Acta Diurna, a daily report of governmental activities.

There were no professional journalists in the early 1400s to take advantage of Johann Gutenberg’s new and exciting moveable type press. In fact, it wasn’t until 1505 that a German printer in Augsburg named Erhard Oeglin put out a broadside that announced the discovery of Brazil.

There were no professional journalists to chronicle the travels of Marco Polo (1300s) or to report the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus (1492) or to tell the horrors of Russia’s Ivan the Terrible (1500s).

There were no professional journalists to chronicle the challenges to the Crown by Oliver Cromwell (1600s) or to report the advancement of freedom during the American Revolution (1700s) or to tell the stories of the Spanish-American War or even the Civil War, which ended in 1865.

After the Civil war, things began to change. (more…)

“Where were you when George Bush was President?” You know that question well. It’s been asked of each of us more times than any of us would care to count. Do you know how I usually answer it?

I was home, enjoying my life. I went to work every day and focused on doing the best job that I could do. When I wasn’t working, I hung out with family and friends. I went to baseball games, and barbecues, and obscure little hole-in-the-wall joints to hear some of my favorite live music over a couple of Guinnesses. Yum.

Why? Because while George Bush was president, we had a media establishment that was challenging our government, not our citizens.

I wasn’t necessarily happy with the direction of the country in those days. But I could sleep at night, knowing that we had media that pressed George Bush and our Congress on every single issue. I could know at any given moment what the “death count” was in Iraq because just about every channel splashed a persistent counter in the bottom corner of the television screen. When bills like the Patriot Act were first introduced in Congress, I never lacked for any detail on the dangers of the legislation. There was barely a single detail that went uncovered in the daily political grind. When there was a scandal to research and report, I certainly never had to do that myself. There were reporters who did all that.

Yep, I’m actually missing the Bush days now. I had so much more free time. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always done my homework and researched issues on my own anyway. I recognize that all media is biased to some degree (and has been for quite some time). But I could always count on the media to challenge the government in the days of George Bush. I wrote my fair share of letters, I called and complained about the spending, even attended a few protests, but I can’t say that I ever felt there just wasn’t anyone challenging the president in the mainstream media. Quite the contrary, there was never any lack of DC pushback from the collective press in those days.

But we live in extraordinary times today. There now exists this giant, open cavity where that healthy pushback against government used to be. And when the mainstream media stepped away from that opening in 2008, two things happened:

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