Writer David Simon believes the Internet has created an army of citizen-journalists who are contributing to the lowering of journalistic standards and the decrease in the amount of reliable news.
“There’s something to be said for how democratic the Internet has made the world,” said Simon, a former Baltimore newspaper reporter. “We all can have our say, and everybody can blog, and everyone can be a citizen-journalist. Sounds really good — citizen-journalist. What it’s really saying is we can do without professional journalists.”
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In the latest installment of its “Issues in Baltimore” lecture series, Goucher College hosted Simon recently, and he didn’t disappoint – aiming his trademark vitriol at the federal government’s response to Hurricane Ike.
“If you care about [your neighbors] to a great extent, and you wanted to intervene in problems they’ve been having … you would call yourself a good neighbor, you might call yourself a friend. You would not be so arrogant as to call yourself a citizen-social worker. The contempt for journalism is now so complete that anyone with an opinion is going to be a citizen-journalist.”
Simon, whose on-screen contributions include “The Wire” and the new “Generation Kill,” entitled his rant “The Audacity of Despair” — a tweak on the Barack Obama autobiography, “The Audacity of Hope.”
Simon cited a recent story in The New York Times about barges being anchored in New Orleans canals as Hurricane Ike approached. These were the same kind of barges that smashed over canal walls and led to the drowning deaths of hundreds of New Orleans residents during Hurricane Katrina. Simon lamented the unlearned lessons.
“How much would it take,” Simon asked, “for a competent … government to say, you know what, there’s a hurricane coming? Let’s take the barges out of the canal. They left the barges in the canal again. That is the America that we are now engaged in. That is the country depicted in ‘The Wire,’ to a great extent.
To Simon, blogs and other online outlets have “absconded with the froth” of newspapers — the froth, he said, being the back-and-forth dialogue these outlets foster in their readers. Has the watchdog role of journalism been corrupted?
Thomas “Jefferson was famously quoted as saying he would rather have a country of newspapers and no government than a country with a government and no newspapers,” Simon said.
“I fear we’re about to start living the Jeffersonian nightmare.”
