Citizen journalism is unregulated by the journalistic values, so the most notable risk for citizen journalism is the ethical questions it may raise. Matt Sienkiewicz (2014) claims that the value of amateur journalism is divorced from the journalistic virtues such as impartiality or accuracy. News organizations are increasingly obsessed with the competition for speed and reporting promptly, leaving them with limited time to make decision (Rosenberg and Feldman, 2008, cited in Patching and Hirst, 2014: 202). This problem of rushing to be the first is more severe in social media, where the amateurs lack the access to varied sources and the ability to verify the information. Secondly, the comments from the citizen journalists in social media are
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It is argued that the public were no longer expect to the interpretation and analysis of an important issue because they can simply watch things unfold in real time and make judgment on their own (Dunlop, 2012, cited in Patching and Hirst, 2014: 214). However, the raw materials uploaded by amateur needs interpretation and synthesis, otherwise the information will be too fragmented to make any sense. Another example could be the video filmed by Daniel Van Duren (2015), a eyewitness who captured the moment successive huge blasts destroyed the industrial park. This amateur filmed footage of the city-scale explosion is full of explicit language and even laughing. It failed to see the huge scale of human suffering indicated by the huge scale of explosion, but merely treated the explosion as a spectacular. As Rentschler (2004: 300, cited in Tait, 2011) observes, the narratives and images of suffering is not intrinsically packaged with interpretations of scale and influences, so audiences would become passive consumers of suffering if the discourse of suffering lack the connection with the background knowledge of why it happened or how they could react. The report in daily mail (O’Flynn and Reuters, 2015) shows many photos of the homeless people lived in the nearby school and the anxious and grief faces in the report have humanized the story. It also synthesizes a variety of sources, enabling the audience to see this event through multiple
It is argued that the public were no longer expect to the interpretation and analysis of an important issue because they can simply watch things unfold in real time and make judgment on their own (Dunlop, 2012, cited in Patching and Hirst, 2014: 214). However, the raw materials uploaded by amateur needs interpretation and synthesis, otherwise the information will be too fragmented to make any sense. Another example could be the video filmed by Daniel Van Duren (2015), a eyewitness who captured the moment successive huge blasts destroyed the industrial park. This amateur filmed footage of the city-scale explosion is full of explicit language and even laughing. It failed to see the huge scale of human suffering indicated by the huge scale of explosion, but merely treated the explosion as a spectacular. As Rentschler (2004: 300, cited in Tait, 2011) observes, the narratives and images of suffering is not intrinsically packaged with interpretations of scale and influences, so audiences would become passive consumers of suffering if the discourse of suffering lack the connection with the background knowledge of why it happened or how they could react. The report in daily mail (O’Flynn and Reuters, 2015) shows many photos of the homeless people lived in the nearby school and the anxious and grief faces in the report have humanized the story. It also synthesizes a variety of sources, enabling the audience to see this event through multiple