Bertrand Pecquerie of the World Editors Forum, went after citizens’ media, Dan Gillmor, and me at CBSNews.com. I responded here. Now Dan responds to the second of two attacks on us citizens at CBSNews:
In both cases, representatives of the traditional Fourth Estate are doubting the usefulness of the Fifth Estate of bloggers and others who don’t fit into the neat boundaries of the professional class of journalists. In both cases, they raise interesting questions that devolve into straw-men attacks.
Bertrand’s equation … — more blogging=less democracy — is laughably spurious. I mean, the old East Germany had 99.999 percent turnout and not an ounce of officially permitted independent thinking: Now there was a democracy, right?
Professional journalism does not gain credibility by casting stones at the bottom-up media, which definitely can use some improvement as it veers into journalism but is not trying — at least not in my view of things — to replace the traditional media.
Pecquerie suggests that citizen media is just another bubble. By what standard?
I’d say that the bubble here is mass media. It was a long-lasting, super-duper, bubblegum bubble, but it’s deflating now.
