Although Clear Channel recently sold a sizable chunk of airspace and (arguably) shifted the dial that meters how much information it controls from "ludicrous" to merely "ridiculous," it still remains one of the worst corporations ever. Now, if there's one thing that popular culture has taught me about evil organizations, it's that they're almost always controlled by one super evil mastermind (assisted, of course, by a ruthless, sexless top henchman), but their day-to-day operations rely on any number of generally inept goons. In the scheme of today's topic, Clear Channel is that evil organization, and Mr. Steven Spendlove, the station manager for KFTY-TV, a Clear Channel TV station in Santa Rosa, Cal., is our utterly inept goon.
You think this citizen journalist is giving up his footage? Hell no.Image courtesy of Raincoast Books
Mr. Spendlove has an idea. Long story short: His station stopped making money a long time ago (thereby rendering it useless to the Clear Channel profit machine), so, in a fit of managerial brilliance, he fired his entire news staff and now plans to rely on citizen journalists to provide the content he'll air as news. He will use footage given to him by independent filmmakers, students and community leaders as his news. Mr. Spendlove "hasn't determined" whether he'll pay the people who provide his footage. He hopes to follow the successful precedents set by citizen journalism coverage of calamities -- Hurricane Katrina, the London Subway Bombings, citizen reportage after a military coup in Thailand shut down their media -- and the advent of South Korea's OhMyNews, which accepts citizen journalism content and even makes a profit.
However, there are distinct differences between all of these other instances of citizen journalism, or what one could call "journalistic crowd sourcing," and what Mr. Spendlove is trying to do.
Let me philosophize for a second:
The opening line to Jean-Paul Sartre's Republic of Silence is, "We were never more free than during the German occupation." Sartre is, of course, talking about France's occupation by Nazi Germany in World War II, and what he's getting at is that under intensely oppressive circumstances, all of our actions become invested with moral significance. Triviality is stripped away, and every single action and decision we make assumes an amount of gravity and importance we do not assign any action or decision in our normal, daily lives. When people find themselves entangled in such oppressive circumstances -- terrorist attacks, hurricanes and political coups certainly qualify -- they act. The people who took pictures and provided other news content about these events did so with a sense of urgency. In the sleepy, warm Californian town of Santa Rosa, home of Peanuts' creator Charles Shulz, zany museum curator Robert Ripley, and the undefinable legendary growler Tom Waits (not to mention a rotating flock of tourists bound for the town's world-renowned wine tasting vineyards), nothing has that sense of urgency.
Spendlove's project differs drastically from the case of OhMyNews as well, because while that was an exciting new project steeped in the annals of democracy and the marketplace of ideas, the attempt to make KFTY-TV reliant on citizen journalism is a corporate ripoff of an exciting project steeped in democracy. Furthermore, as Spendlove (and lots of people in the mainstream media) seems to have forgotten, CITIZEN JOURNALISTS DON'T NEED THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA. While traditional bloggers often don't do much more than "recycle and chew on the news," citizen journalists who create their own content are free to publish their work online, where it will be available to a large audience, without the help of anyone, especially the corporate media whores they most likely don't like in the first place. They won't get paid either way, but at least if citizen journalists post their own content on their own website, it won't face the censorship of editors under pressure from advertisers, it won't be lumped in with a bunch of other crap they don't care about, and they'll actually get to take all the credit for all the work they did. What's to gain from the alternative? The glorious prestige that will befall you by getting your homemade video to air on a bankrupt TV station that no one watches, no one advertises with, no one cares about, and is the weak little baby of a monstrous media conglomerate that doesn't even give a shit about it?
Good luck, Mr. Spendlove, but I predict the overwhelming consensus response to your call for citizen journalist contributions to your crappy station will be: Thanks for the offer, KFTY, but no thanks.
