Tanni Haas: Question 9

In this same book, you discuss how many forms of online journalism, instead of encouraging or facilitating public deliberation, tend to privilege news content and discussion around an assumption of shared values and goals. You point out this leaves many community members out of the stories. This is a striking observation, as public journalism also criticized journalists as working from shared values and goals that resulted in news content that was disengaged from what citizens cared about. So, while the technology of news gathering and distribution changes, and, over time, the professionalism of the “reporter” may be different, we are still left with the inevitable place of values. What lessons does public journalism have to offer citizen journalism on this issue?

The most important lesson public journalism has to offer citizen journalism with respect to values is that it should not assume there are any overarching, substantive values to which all citizens subscribe. Indeed, any reference to shared values and, by implication, shared political interests is bound to privilege certain dominant values and political interests over other more marginalized ones. That said, to encourage and facilitate genuine public deliberation, citizen journalism ought to operate in terms of the procedural, but not substantive, value of rational-critical deliberation: the idea that all citizens ought to be offered the opportunity to participate in public deliberation, and that all views and the evidence offered in support of those views ought to made available to criticism, evaluation and continuous refinement in the light of other views and supporting evidence.