Citizen Journalism : We are the Media

Citizen Journalism is the phenomenon that offers every active society member to become a media broadcaster and play an active role in collecting, analysing and reporting the news.
In other words when ordinary citizens use their own news stories they witnesses themselves, videos, images and etc, to broadcast a recent event or incident, the platform for such news does include any limits and can be on blogs ,to Facebook and Youtube.
There are diversified theories and opinions about this phenomenon , some write positively and some disagree and claim” this is not journalism “ and the term journalism ,is ethically and academically wrong to be mentioned in “ citizen journalism” , since people spend years in universities and educational providers to study this profession and whatever comes out of ordinary citizens cannot be trusted , due to the fact that they have not been professionally trained to be unbiased about the news stories. Therefore, the outcome of citizen journalism cannot be trusted.

However, Citizen Journalism has proved to be quite effective in my opinion, an example to illustrate the effectiveness, is what happened in June 2009 election in Iran, where thousands of protesters, demonstrated for their vote and right, in the streets of Tehran.
If it wasn’t for the phenomenon of the Citizen journalism and the mobile videos, images , blogs ,twittering and Facebook status’s from the protesters themselves, we were not able to see what actually happened in Tehran and other major cities of Iran.
In fact these videos and images were that reliable to the point that even massive media broadcaster chose to show the videos and images on their TV stations as an evidence of what is happening in Iran as we speak. For instance BBC News Corporations constantly aired recent videos of Iranian demonstrators.

Even capturing the death of a young woman , Neda agha Soltan, who turned to an Iranian martyr and a symbol of strength and consistency for demonstrating against the government, to make sure she and others like her ,did not die in vain.

According to A. J. Liebling, “freedom of the press is for those who own it” and Since in Iran , and so many other dictatorship regimes ( sometimes even in the western media )The media news and broadcasting news has to fit in to a particular framework and advocate for particular ideology that promotes the existence of the regime, it can be hardly believed and trusted of the outcome of news reports , in this case Citizen journalism can be quite efficient and effective in terms of approaching the reality of news stories without biased opinions distort and manipulating information.
As what we saw in the Iranian Television was the exact opposite of what actually was happening , showing that everything is calm and not even mentioning the protesters.
Of course , The Iranian Television Broadcasting has had the reputation of being totally corrupted and not a lot of people tune in to hear the news and usually rely on foreign media broadcasting televisions through satellite. (such as BBC Persia , CNN and VOA ).