The citizen media debate is quite an interesting one, as there are two quite valid issues that come into conflict.
a) Freedom of information, and general open government related issues
b) An appropriate level of accountability for those involved.
The main issue about all forms of citizen media is that it has only recently evolved to the point whereby it can be used easily and effectively to reach a large number of people, and as such appropriate controls have completely failed to keep pace with this development.
In the past a private citizen unless possessing a vast amount of resources could never hope to be able to reach out beyond his immediate sphere of influence, but today pretty much anyone can utilise the internet through blogs or private webpages and reach all across the globe.
Now this type of progress is all very good and represents increased information exchange and more genuine openness. The problem is when someone, either gets it wrong, or is overly biased, or plane just lies and makes up the story. The various libel laws are great when they are applied to a massive company (the only people who previously had the ability to reach this kind of audience) but are utterly useless against a private individual with very little real assets.
In the past therefore any flat out lies, or untruths, or even stories that are just so incredibly biased as to be unfair to those involved would not have the opportunity to spread very far, and any organisations that did spread such things, would be appropriately punished. Now however Joe Public via Citizen media can spread such stories with very little any party effected can do to stop, or get recovery from.
There is therefore still a balance to be worked out between appropriate freedoms of reporting and the rights of the subject matters of this reporting to not be reported unfairly.
Personally I would like to see some form of voluntary regulation of the media, whereby anyone who wants to be considered a “reliable” media source volunteers to be subject to various rules and regulations about their conduct and subject to certain penalties if they break them. Everyone else can still act as such, but would have to have appropriate disclaimers on their work which basically mean “take this with a grain of salt”, as we are unregulated and don’t wish to be so – read into that what you will.
